Style, Rhetoric and Creativity in Language

This chapter probes the common (and perhaps controversial)perception of many in the UK and Ireland that people from North America“don’t do” irony. Stimulated by the type of discussion found in Nash’s The Language ofHumour (1985), the author interrogates this folkbelief by developing a quantitative methodology to capture the ways in whichironic situations are interpreted by people from diverse nationalbackgrounds. This methodology comprises an anonymous online experiment whichgathers reactions to