{"id":12318,"date":"2009-01-07T08:30:31","date_gmt":"2009-01-07T08:30:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wordswarm.net\/dictionary\/deus_ex_machina.html"},"modified":"2009-01-07T08:30:31","modified_gmt":"2009-01-07T08:30:31","slug":"deus_ex_machina","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/2009\/01\/07\/deus_ex_machina.html","title":{"rendered":"Deus ex Machina"},"content":{"rendered":"

Any active agent who appears unexpectedly to solve an insoluble difficulty.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The concept of irony was first introduced to me by a high school English teacher in a way that baffled me. She described irony as "reality differing from the masked appearance." <\/p>\n

Neither I nor a single one of my fellow 9th grade classmates knew what our teacher was talking about. Her definition sounded, at best, like Bible verse — parables, maybe. A feeling of inferiority and intellectual incompetence passed among us as she repeated her definition of "irony" many, many times. <\/p>\n

Smiling a Cheshire grin her voice steadily decreased in volume until she was barely whispering the phrase "Reality differing from the masked appearance." She spoke through squinting eyes, through a seemingly knowing smile, through something like wisdom, through something that made the definition of "irony" impossible for us to decipher. <\/p>\n

I would come to understand irony later that year, not at school (like so many things) but in a conversation with friends regarding the final episode of the television show "M*A*S*H". In that episode the Korean War ends and the American M*A*S*H personnel go home — except for Sergeant Klinger. Klinger ended up staying having met and fallen in love with a local Korean woman. <\/p>\n

"That," a friend of mine declared, "is irony!" <\/p>\n

I noticed my friend’s understanding of that word because I was still puzzled by my English teacher’s "reality differing from the masked appearance" obscurity. Klinger staying in Korea is ironic because throughout the run of M*A*S*H his character made elaborate efforts to get kicked out of the service with a Section 8 discharge. Klinger, of all people, would have been the first one to get out of Korea when the opportunity presented itself, but it was he who ended up staying behind.<\/p>\n

Irony!<\/p>\n

My 9th grade English teacher’s definition of irony has come to make a little bit of sense to me over time, but not much. It may be that its obtuseness is symptomatic of a general misunderstanding of irony, or for that matter a genuine discrepancy of the concept. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Any active agent who appears unexpectedly to solve an insoluble difficulty.    <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[36],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12318","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-whats-the-word","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paumAn-3cG","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12318","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12318"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12318\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12318"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12318"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12318"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}