If you haven’t yet tuned into the joy of reading Theodore Dalrymple, a regular at The Spectator, I recommend you check him out. His latest offering tells of plans to move to France. Britain is just too awful.
Curmudgeonly Dalrymple is a stylist, an elegant old-fashioned writer. So imagine my surprise on finding him being corrected online on a matter of usage by somebody going by the name of “Gaz”. While tripping through NZPundit the other day, looking for a laugh, I noticed Gordon had linked to Dalrymple and this “Gaz” had left a note:
“Well, all joking aside.... ‘Ironical’ isn't a word,” he wrote.
Here is the offending item:
“Try as I might, however, I can see little charm to life in Britain, even if its vaunted economic recovery were not, as it clearly is, a house of cards. The British strike me as frivolous without gaiety and earnest without seriousness, which is why Mr Blair is so apt a leader for them. They have all but lost their saving grace (and a very great saving grace it was), their ironical humour.”
This may seem a minor thing, hardly even worth noting, but it made me think and wonder, either of which is no mean achievement. Also I’ve just bought Boswell’s life of Samuel Johnston and fully intend to read it one day so, qualified or not, I’ve been feeling a bit grammarian recently.
Initially I was inclined to agree with “Gaz”. My gut feel was “ironical” was some awful modern mutant. It is a damned ugly word and should not be allowed to exist. Certainly I would discourage the Girlie from using it, especially when plain “ironic” does the job so well. But then I had a creeping suspicion that if I bothered to look up the Oxford “ironical” could well be there.
I did. It was.
Ironical is an adjective with three listed meanings with a first citing dating from 1576: “He was (belike) some Pomilio or little dwarfe and that made him to use this eironical method.”
So, it shouldn't come as any surprise that Dalrymple (and the editors at The Spectator) were correct. Not only that, in his sentence the word reads rather well. It's not ugly at all. And that in turn reminds me of the Girlie, a few years back. She was enquiring about some Girlish issue and asked if it would be “more better” if she did this rather than that.
“Just better, Girlie," I corrected. "You don’t need the more."
A few months later, after seeing the surreal Peter Greenaway film of The Tempest called Prospero’s Books, I was reading the play to find out what the story was about. And there in Act 1, Scene 2 you find Prospero saying this to his Girlie Miranda:
“I have done nothing but in care of thee,
Of thee, my dear one, thee, my daughter, who
Art ignorant of what thou art, nought knowing
Of whence I am: nor that I am more better
Than Prospero, master of a full poor cell,
And thy no greater father.”
Like rain and a free ride, isn’t that ironical?
And now a public safety warning...
Pauline writes in response to our dryer lint discussions to warn you all NOT to use this to stuff toys. Apparently it's highly flammable.
So maybe we should take Shyrel's advice, which I didn't post a few months back, and add it to your compost. If that's okay with you Greens...
She also says she's had an online journal for five years "and have written about any number of subjects and what gets the most hits, the most attention, the most links? Yep... this silly entry that I did as a gag!"