On the use of the typo to signal irony on Twitter

Irony, clearly labeled

One of the problems with rhetorical irony is that sometimes people don’t get it. That’s also a major source of its appeal. When irony works, the reader sees it but holds out the possibility that someone else does not. This effect is a big part of the fun, even though plenty of satirical writing cheats it by deploying irony in a way few readers could miss. The trick is to maintain a sort of plausible deniability. Irony doesn’t have to actually fool anybody, but we as knowing readers must be able to fool ourselves into believing it might. Satire can therefore be pretty heavy-handed, so long as the irony is not explicitly signaled. I mention this to introduce a convention of irony Twitter that has bled over into other sub-comunities: the practice of signaling irony with typographical errors. For example:

Is it cheating to explicitly signal irony in this way? Consideration after the jump.

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Finally, Shepard Smith is creeped out

httpv://youtu.be/YuF03PTNpp8

Years of cognitive dissonance seem finally to have broken through Shepard Smith’s head membrane at its weakest point, his mouth. For those of you who threw away your GOP primaries character chart, Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney were enemies. Strangely, of all the obviously not true things Mitt Romney has said this year, “Ann and I are proud to call Newt and Callista friends” is somehow the most galling to me. Don’t lie about who your friends are. Just because the Republican Party has to form back into Voltron now doesn’t mean they all have to be friends; you can endorse someone politically without endorsing him personally. I don’t want to read too much into this, but the fact that Shepard Smith still has a job after this impromptu, on-air editorial regarding the fundamental nature of politics might tell us how psyched Fox News is about candidate Romney. I’m going to say roughly as psyched as Ann and Mitt are about Pictionary at the Gringriches’.