The events in question might call for the attendance of you, the employer. It refers to a scenario in which two events vie for the same time slot on your calendar.
Clash in timing synonym movie#
Or, a friend might have asked you to catch a movie at the same time as your dental appointment.Ī scheduling conflict in business is similar. By mistake, you might have booked a vacation on the same weekend as a family reunion.
Clash in timing synonym how to#
Read on to learn how to identify and handle a scheduling conflict.Įveryone has experienced a scheduling conflict in their personal life. Its unique versatility, however, may prove to be its undoing.A scheduling conflict can prompt annoyance or level-headed action depending on how you view it. Irony is an incredibly useful term that is applied to a very nebulous set of concepts. The life histories of words are difficult to forecast, and terms go in and out of fashion in unexpected ways. Is irony in danger of becoming skunked? Perhaps. Careful users of language are hesitant to use the newer – and typically broader – uses of terms before they’ve become firmly established. Many dictionaries contain explicit warnings about using such words in these more common yet less accepted ways. Purists maintain that it should only be used to mean “in a hopeful way” – “He looked hopefully in her direction.” However, it is frequently employed to mean “it is hoped that” – “Hopefully, she’ll look in his direction.” However, “transpire” is now frequently used to simply indicate that something has happened – the nuance of “over time” has become lost.
The lexicographer Bryan Garner has referred to such words as “ skunked.”Īs an example, Garner cites “transpire.” Purists maintain that it refers to things that become known only gradually over time. Some terms are used so inconsistently, and arouse such strong feelings about proper usage, that people begin to avoid using them out of fear of appearing uneducated. Of course, irony is not the only problematic word in English. In 2008, Joan Didion worried that Barack Obama’s election was fueled by a naïve belief in “hope” that would transform the country into an “irony-free zone.” Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank wrote in 2019 that Donald Trump’s hypocrisy has – once again – killed irony. In fact, the ironic attitude has been declared dead with almost every change in recent American politics. If this were true, irony didn’t stay dead for long. This affectation is often referred to as the “ ironic attitude” and has come to be associated with adolescents or young adults.įollowing 9/11, many pundits announced the “ death of irony,” arguing that a frivolous and flippant attitude, often described as ironic, was out of step with the times. One reason that irony is so confusing is that the word also refers to a certain perspective or style: one that is detached, aloof and seemingly world-weary.
Clash in timing synonym manual#
“The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage,” for example, warns that “not every coincidence, curiosity, oddity and paradox is an irony even loosely.” Warnings abound in dictionaries and style guides. In 1996, Alanis Morissette was roundly criticized by pedants who argued that the examples of situational irony in her song “Ironic” – “It’s like rain on your wedding day” – were not, in fact, ironic. It’s not ironic when a magician cancels a show due to “unforeseen circumstances,” but it is when a psychic’s performance is canceled for the same reason. It’s not ironic when someone’s home is burglarized, but it is if the owner had just installed an elaborate security system and had failed to activate it. In other cases, however, a situation may lack an essential element that irony seems to require. And the January 2020 rescheduling of an annual snowball fight at the University of British Columbia was correctly described as ironic because of the reason for the cancelation: too much snow. A photo of a sign in front of a school with a misspelled word – “ We are committed to excellense” – went viral. Consider situational irony, in which two things become odd or humorous when juxtaposed. Some cases, however, are relatively straightforward. Insulting someone by saying they’re the most intelligent person on Earth, for example, doesn’t mean they are the least intelligent it just means they’re not all that bright.
But such expectations are subjective, and verbal ironists don’t always mean the exact opposite of what they say. This clash carries over to verbal irony, in which people say the opposite of what they literally mean. It’s ironic, for example, when your boss calls you into her office, and you’re expecting a promotion, but you instead find out you’ve been fired. Typically, the outcome is the opposite of what someone wanted or hoped for. In general, irony refers to a clash between expectations and outcomes. In my recently published book, “ Irony and Sarcasm,” I attempt to disentangle knotty issues like these.
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