Interpret verbal irony and puns, use word relationships, and distinguish connotations of near-synonyms

Learning goal: Demonstrate understanding of figurative language, word relationships and nuances in word meanings. Interpret figures of speech, including verbal irony and puns, in context. Use the relationship between particular words to understand each of them better. Distinguish among the connotations of words with similar denotations. Use the academic vocabulary of this lesson, irony, pun, denotation, connotation, imply and infer, accurately in your own analysis.

Original story — Perfect Weather for a Play

The outdoor stage behind Cedar Hollow Middle School was a rectangle of plywood on cinder blocks, and by five o'clock on the evening of the performance the rain had been drumming on its blue tarp for an hour.

"Perfect weather for an outdoor play," said Jonah, the understudy, watching water pour off one corner of the tarp into a bucket that had stopped mattering some time ago.

Ms. Ferreira, the director, did not look up from her clipboard. "The forecast said the storm would put a damper on things," she said, and handed him a stack of ponchos. "So I brought dampers of my own."

Noor, who ran the lights, arrived carrying a heavy black case. "You told us to project," she said to Ms. Ferreira. "So I brought the projector." Nobody laughed, which Noor said was the correct response to a pun of that quality.

The problem was not the audience, who could sit under the pavilion. The problem was the stage, whose downstage edge had begun to sink into the mud. Jonah tested it with a foot and watched the plywood dip an inch. "At least the play is going down well," he said.

"Enough," said Ms. Ferreira, but she was almost smiling. She was, everyone agreed, a firm director. Her older brother, who had come to help carry benches, called her bullheaded; the parent volunteers called her persistent; and the school newspaper, which had interviewed her in March, had settled on resolute. Jonah privately thought that all four words described the same woman deciding the same thing, which was that the play would go on, and that the words told you more about the speakers than about her.

The lead, Elias, was ill, which was why Jonah was standing in the rain in costume. He had spent four months learning lines he had assumed he would never say. Now, watching the stage sink, he found that he could not decide whether the weather was the worst luck of his life or the best excuse.

At six the rain thinned to a drizzle, then to a mist. The custodian and two of the parent volunteers lifted the downstage edge onto two more blocks while Noor's crew kept everyone off the stage. Ms. Ferreira folded her umbrella, looked at the sky, and said, in a voice with nothing ironic in it at all, "Well. Perfect weather for a play."

Jonah inferred, from the fact that she did not look at him, that she had heard him the first time.

Verbal irony. Verbal irony is saying one thing while meaning something close to its opposite, and relying on the listener to notice. Jonah's first line, "Perfect weather for an outdoor play," is verbal irony because the rain has been drumming for an hour and a bucket has given up; the context makes the literal meaning impossible, so the listener supplies the intended one, that the weather is dreadful. Interpreting verbal irony always means checking the words against the situation. Nearly the same words, "Well. Perfect weather for a play," spoken by Ms. Ferreira at the end, after the rain has thinned to a mist and the stage has been propped up, are not ironic at all; the story says her voice has nothing ironic in it, and the improved weather now fits the words closely enough for them to be meant. A reader who labels every instance of that sentence ironic has stopped reading context. Two neighbors of verbal irony are worth separating. Sarcasm is verbal irony aimed at someone to mock or wound; Jonah's line mocks the weather, not a person, so it is irony without much sarcasm. Situational irony is an outcome that contradicts expectation, such as an understudy who learned his lines assuming he would never say them and now must; that is a feature of the plot, not of anyone's words, and the standard's term verbal irony does not cover it.

Puns. A pun is a play on a word that has two meanings, or on two words that sound alike, so that both meanings are active at once. Noor's pun turns on two senses of the verb project: to throw the voice so that it carries, which is what a director tells actors, and to throw an image onto a screen, which is what the machine called a projector does. Noor takes the instruction in the second sense and brings the machine. The joke works only if the listener holds both meanings. Jonah's "the play is going down well" works because going down well ordinarily means being received well by an audience, while the stage is literally going down into the mud. Ms. Ferreira's damper is the loosest of the three: to put a damper on something is to discourage it, and she answers with ponchos, things that keep off the damp, so the joke plays on the damp inside damper. To interpret a pun, name both meanings and say what in the context activates each; a pun that a reader can explain is a pun the reader has understood, whether or not anyone laughs.

Word relationships. Some pairs of words define each other, and using the relationship sharpens both. Imply and infer are the clearest case: to imply is to suggest a meaning without stating it, and to infer is to draw a conclusion from evidence. In any one exchange, whoever puts the meaning in implies and whoever draws it out infers, and the same person can do both at different moments. Ms. Ferreira implies that she heard Jonah's earlier irony by repeating his words and not looking at him; Jonah infers it. A student who knows the relationship will never write that a speaker inferred something to an audience. Understudy and the role it covers are defined by each other: an understudy is a performer who learns another performer's role in order to take it over if needed, so the word always points to a role it covers; Jonah understudies the lead, Elias, so in this story the word carries the lead inside it. Downstage and upstage are a pair in which one explains the other: downstage is the part of the stage nearest the audience, upstage the part farthest away, and knowing either fixes both. Words also relate by degree: mist, drizzle, rain and downpour name the same thing at increasing intensity, and the story's rain thinning "to a drizzle, then to a mist" is understood by reading down that scale. Relationships of cause and effect, rain to mud to sinking stage, and part to whole, downstage edge to stage, are other ways one word helps a reader hold another.

Connotation and denotation. Denotation is the meaning a dictionary states; connotation is the attitude and association a word carries with it. Bullheaded, willful, firm, persistent and resolute share a similar denotation: determined to hold to a decision. They do not share a connotation. Bullheaded is strongly negative, stubborn without sense. Willful is negative, insisting on one's own way against advice. Firm is close to neutral, steady and not easily moved. Persistent leans positive, continuing despite difficulty. Resolute is positive, admirably determined. In the story the brother, the volunteers and the newspaper each chose a word for one woman making one decision, and Jonah's observation is the lesson: the choice reveals the speaker's attitude more than the director's character. A writer who wants to report the decision without an attitude uses the plain description, that she decided the play would go on, or the most neutral word available, firm. A writer who wants to convey an attitude chooses the connotation on purpose and should be able to defend it from the evidence.

A worked model. A student is asked to interpret Jonah's line "At least the play is going down well." Step one, the literal situation: the downstage edge has sunk an inch into the mud. Step two, the ordinary sense of the phrase: an audience is enjoying a performance. Step three, the pun: both senses are active, and the words at least signal that Jonah knows the literal sense, the sinking stage, is the only one true tonight. Step four, the effect: the pun lets Jonah name a disaster lightly, which fits a character who copes with bad luck by joking. Step five, the academic vocabulary: this is first a pun, because Jonah is saying two things at once; and because the idiom's cheerful sense is exactly what the situation denies, a reader can also hear verbal irony in it, and either label can be defended from the context as long as the reasoning names both meanings. The interpretation names the figure, the meanings, the contextual evidence and the effect. Usage is a matter of convention, and the labels for figures of speech are conventions too; conventions can change and are sometimes contested, so when a term is disputed, consult a reference such as a dictionary of English usage and say which definition you are using.

Worked interpretation of verbal irony: Jonah's "Perfect weather for an outdoor play." Context: rain drumming for an hour, water pouring into a useless bucket. The literal statement cannot be meant, so the intended meaning is its opposite: the weather could hardly be worse. Evidence of intent: the timing, directly after the description of the rain. Effect: it establishes Jonah as someone who copes with bad luck by joking. Nearly the same sentence at the end, "Perfect weather for a play," spoken by Ms. Ferreira after the rain has thinned to a mist, is sincere; the story says her voice has nothing ironic in it, and the improved situation now fits the words. Irony lives in the gap between words and situation, and when the gap closes, the irony is gone.

Worked use of a word relationship: A draft reads, "Ms. Ferreira inferred that she had heard Jonah by repeating his words." Apply the definitions: to imply is to suggest without stating; to infer is to draw a conclusion from evidence. Ms. Ferreira is putting the meaning in, so she implied; Jonah, drawing it out, inferred. Corrected: "Ms. Ferreira implied that she had heard Jonah by repeating his words, and Jonah inferred it from the fact that she did not look at him." The relationship between the two words corrected the sentence and clarified both words at once.

Worked connotation choice: A student is writing a neutral news report about the performance going ahead. Draft: "The bullheaded director refused to cancel." Bullheaded denotes unwillingness to change course but connotes senseless stubbornness, an attitude the report has not earned with evidence. Revised: "The director decided the play would go on despite the rain." For a profile that wants to praise her, "resolute" would be defensible if the piece shows her judgment was sound; for a complaint from a parent who wanted cancellation, "willful" would reveal the complainant's attitude. Similar denotation, three connotations, three different pieces of writing.

Figure and connotation log: For each of the four figures in the story, the verbal irony and the three puns, write the literal situation, the meanings in play, the contextual evidence that activates them and the effect. Then arrange bullheaded, willful, firm, persistent and resolute on a line from most negative to most positive, and beside each write a one-sentence context in which a speaker would choose that word and what the choice would reveal about the speaker.

Independent performance: Write a 300-word original scene in which one character uses verbal irony once and a pun once, and in which two other characters describe the same action with words of similar denotation but different connotations. Follow the scene with a commentary of about 150 words that names each figure, explains it from context, corrects one deliberate imply or infer error you planted in the scene, and explains one word relationship, such as a pair of opposites or a scale of degree, that helps a reader understand two words in the scene. A partner reads the scene without the commentary and must be able to identify the irony, explain the pun and rank the connotations; revise any figure the partner cannot explain from the context you gave. Success criteria: every figure is interpretable from context alone; every connotation claim is defended with the speaker's evident attitude; imply and infer are used correctly; the academic terms irony, pun, denotation and connotation appear accurately.