Origin of situational irony as "enlivened by perverse appropriateness"?
March 6, 2010 6:00 PM   Subscribe

Situational irony is commonly defined on the internet as discrepancy between expected and actual results when enlivened by 'perverse appropriateness'. I'd like to know who first used the exact phrase "enlivened by perverse appropriateness." Any clues? My googlefu is not strong enough.
posted by langedon to Writing & Language (7 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
I assume it's whoever added the phrase to the Wikipedia article. You'll notice that your wording is identical. The quotes around "perverse appropriateness" are ungrammatical and unnecessary. But the internet has become an echo chamber for the sounds Wikipedia makes.
posted by argybarg at 6:15 PM on March 6, 2010 [1 favorite]


The phrase was added to Wikipedia on August 27th, 2007 by someone only identified by an IP address. The phrase is not sourced but "perverse appropriateness" is within single inverted commas, which the contributor uses elsewhere to indicate a quote. So the "perverse appropriateness" may be a quote, but I can't find any famous quote using that wording.
posted by Kattullus at 7:17 PM on March 6, 2010 [2 favorites]




The Google Books results show usage of the term perverse appropriateness dating back to 1968. Almost all the results up until the mid 1990s relate in some way to literary criticism (particularly poetry), and it appears in some important works such as Mary Daly's Gyn/ecology -- probably read by many English majors in an overview course as the representative example of feminist theory.

The usage in Wikipedia is not sourced and thus inappropriate for the 2007 timeframe which is well past when verifiability became the most important basis of Wikipedia self-review. I wouldn't be surprised if that phrase is in some print work somewhere, but it probably does not belong in the article without sourcing.
posted by dhartung at 11:09 PM on March 6, 2010 [1 favorite]


I believe this is a misreading of Edgar Alan Poe "imp of the perverse". Maybe not so much a misreading as an overgeneralization.
posted by bukvich at 5:46 AM on March 7, 2010 [1 favorite]


Response by poster: Interesting. Thanks, all!
posted by langedon at 4:55 PM on March 7, 2010


From JSTOR:
Wesley D. Smith. "Disease in Euripides' Orestes." Hermes, Vol. 95, No. 3 (1967), pp. 291-307.

"I would suppose that Hegelochus' mistake was noticed and remembered because of its perverse appropriateness," p. 299 note 3. Smith doesn't put it in quotes, so he thinks it's just an everyday phrase.

No doubt further searching would unearth earlier instances.
posted by philokalia at 7:00 PM on March 7, 2010


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