You’re complaining to your friends about the endless parade of Zoom meetings on your calendar. “Big deal,” they reply in a chorus. “My heart bleeds for you,” another one writes. “Yeah, right,” you text back. Phrases like these have been forever ruined by their frequency of sarcastic usage and are often treated with distrust by the person on the receiving end. “That’s an interesting idea,” you might say, only to be asked: “wait, are you being sarcastic?”
In short, sarcasm is everywhere. Or maybe you just have mean friends. Aren’t you special.
A brief history
Earlier sarcasmus, the word sarcasm is borrowed from Middle French (sarcasme) or Late Latin (sarcasmos), which is borrowed from Greek sarkázein (“to jeer at while biting the lips.”) Some believe that sarkázein literally meant “to strip off the flesh.” And you think you’re not being hurtful with your sarcastic remarks, Chandler.
Insufferable Friends characters aren’t the only ones that rely on this cognitive-linguistic dance to mock people. Shakespeare certainly liked it. Remember Mark Antony repeatedly calling Brutus an “honorable man”? Spoiler alert: he didn’t mean it. On the way-too-quick wedding of his mother and uncle after his father’s death, Hamlet, the poster boy of sarcasm, remarks:
Thrift, thrift, Horatio! The funeral bak’d meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.
The Bible is another source of good examples. In Exodus 14:11, Moses, who was leading the Israelites from Egypt, is asked:
Was there a lack of graves in Egypt, that you took us away to die in the wilderness?
What’s linguistics got to do with it?
Oscar Wilde said, “sarcasm is the lowest form of wit but the highest form of intelligence.” Sarcasm requires a lot of work to understand. Believe me. Or the scientists:
The mental gymnastics needed to perceive sarcasm includes developing a “theory of mind” to see beyond the literal meaning of the words and understand that the speaker may be thinking of something entirely different. A theory of mind allows you to realize that when your brother says “nice job” when you spill the milk, he means just the opposite, the jerk.
Linguistics is needed to bridge the gap between what you say and what you mean. Here, the relevant areas of study are semantics (the study of meaning) and pragmatics (the study of context and its contribution to meaning).
To appreciate the importance of these two fields, imagine conversations without pragmatics:
‘Can you pass the salt?’
Literal Meaning: Are you physically able to do this task?
Literal Response: ‘Yes’Pragmatic Meaning: Will you pass me the salt?
Pragmatic Response: pass the salt to the speaker.
Similarly, semantics is required because often words have more than one meaning. For instance, to “move” can mean to change positions, pull, push, carry, or stir emotion. Semantics is what gives you the ability to appreciate one-liners like: “I fired my masseuse today. She just rubbed me the wrong way.”
Being able to examine a sentence this way is especially important when trying to understand sarcasm, which is essentially a non-literal use of language, divorcing meaning from utterance and flipping it on its head. Without linguistics, conversations would be dull, meals bland, and joints achy.
Luckily, most of us understand these jokes all too well, leading to amusement and sometimes, traffic jams. Yes, a joke made by Jonathan Agnew, a cricket commentator, caused a 2-mile traffic jam in the UK. Such is the power of language.
The Internet is ruining everything
It’s easy to decode sarcasm when speaking to others, usually. Spoken sarcasm contains helpful elements like intonation (how you vary the pitch of your voice) and stress (how you emphasize certain words). Body language also helps: a rolling of the eyes, a smirk, the use of air-quotes.
Writing makes it harder to understand. Some writers think this is a problem of punctuation. We have exclamation marks to distinguish between “I love how clean your room is” and “I love how clean your room is!” Why not have sarcasm marks to add the variation of “I looove how clean your room is.” The proposed sign: an upside-down exclamation point at the end of a sentence or word. Similarly, the French poet, Alcanter de Brahm (alias, Marcel Bernhardt) proposed in L'ostensoir des ironies (1899) that writers use the irony point (⸮) to indicate when a sentence must be understood at a second level (sarcasm, irony, etc.) Spoiler alert: these didn’t catch on.
The problem persists online in a world- where written communication is increasingly taking the center stage. We have found some ways around it and more effectively than the punctuation-proposers of the past. We use quotation marks, make the sarcastic word bold or italicized, or use faux tags like <sarcasm> and </sarcasm>.
Other tricks used on the internet to convey sarcasm, and other forms of irony, include:
the use of lower caps: think of it as the deadpan, laconic companion to the excited ALL CAPS
deliberately misspelling words: used to great effect by Birds Right Activist, Woman Against Feminism, and other internet residents
entirely deadpan: ask The Onion how that’s going
The common theme in all these strategies (sarcastic typography, if you will) seems to be to shake things up and indicate a divergence from the norm.
Oh, the irony
Sarcasm is sometimes confused with another beast: irony. While Sheldon Cooper doesn’t understand sarcasm, the person who’s most infamous for not understanding irony is Alanis Morissette, the singer and songwriter of the 1995 hit, Ironic, which ironically enough had no good examples of irony, only coincidences and general events that would bum you out. To wit:
A traffic jam when you’re already late
A no-smoking sign on your cigarette break
It’s like ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife
It’s meeting the man of my dreams
And then meeting his beautiful wife
And isn’t it ironic… don’t you think?
Irony is “the use of words to express something other than and especially the opposite of the literal meaning,” (verbal irony, for instance, someone steps out into a hurricane and says, “What nice weather we're having!”) or an outcome that is contrary to what was expected (situational irony, say, a fire station burning down). Irony can arise out of situations but sarcasm is an intended action, defined as “a sharp and often satirical or ironic utterance designed to cut or give pain.” It also includes using words that mean the opposite of what you actually want to say, but with a more malicious intent. As Merriam Webster notes, “Most often, sarcasm is biting, and intended to cause pain.” Think of it as the mean elder sister of wit, repartee, and humor.
If you’ll excuse me now, I need to go watch the best show ever, Friends. Me? Sarcastic? Never.