noun. (pronounced normally)

related: irony-poisoned, adj. and ironic extremism, buzzword.

Condition which causes a person to become so engrossed in ironic representations of statements, ideas, or images, that they become unable to speak in their own voice. Unable to express what they truly believe to be true and good, they instead produce meaningless nonsense and hope that their meaning falls through the gaps.

"(one's) tunnel is so dominated by irony and detachment-based-comedy, that the joke becomes real and you start to do things that are immoral or wrong from a place of deep nihilistic cynicism".

-- urbandictionary.com (2014, May 24)

Few people who use social media enough to know the phrase would ever deign to define it — doing so would be far too earnest, far too self-serious... it’s not clear how important social media is to any irony poisoning. Maybe there’s something about social media that enables the process, or maybe it just happens to play out there sometimes.

-- The Intercept, New York Times. Thursday, August 23, 2018

Among the irony-poisoned, the distinction between ironic expression, meaningless babble, and sincere statements is more granular, less defined by clear boundaries or intentions. When sharing, the purportedly "ironic" concept can convey multiple meanings, until it is collapsed by tone, recipient, and context. The increasingly tribalistic nature of online communities means that the locus of these concepts is less contained in a particular phrase or idea, and more in the shared headspace of online identity. Insider coding also makes it difficult for outsiders to detect the full range of a message's concepts, except for the most blatant. Any individuals suspected of harboring irony-favored thinking should be reported to the authorities.

291 words

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