At some point clarity lost its legitimacy to subtlety, and ironic disaffection and apathy became the cultural currency of the hip. Never having been hip, or subtle, it is hard to say when which gave way to what (which actually is hard to say), but the end result was irony becoming the key social moderator. About the same time reading became not so popular, which is a bit of problem when your locus of cool is a fairly slippery esoteric concept. What are the retro clad and bearded masses to do?
In an effort to keep the smug barista and spoken word poetry industry from grinding to a halt Beats Entropy is going to drop a little knowledge.
Let us define our terms:
Irony= when the result of an action is contrary to the desired or expected effect or contrary to some intrinsic quality (real or inferred).
Things entirely devoid of irony
It gets dark at night
Surrender is a word of French extraction.
Ugly people are often sad
Now I could get all fancy and suss out all the gradations of irony through a series of complex logical syllogisms, but we both know that sort of academic hokum proves nothing. The only legitimate method of exploring such a topic is a peer reviewed, toast backed, scale from 1-20. Let’s get down to business.
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Flawed But Fixable 