Sunday, February 20, 2011

Literally Ironic Alert

I'm going to do something more substantial tomorrow or Wednesday night, but since posting has been a little sparse around here lately

/clears throat
/glares at other FireJay writers as much as one can do so on the internet, which is not at all

I decided I should throw up a quickie tonight. First of all, while watching some of the Daytona 500 today (yeah that's right, that happened, I channel surf to NASCAR occasionally, deal with it, I just happen to find it relaxing) I learned from one of FOX's announcers that the late Dale Earnhardt was an incredibly strong guy.

He literally carried the sport on his back.

That's pretty impressive. Just remember, kids: literally is a word that adds emphasis to nonsensical figures of speech.

And for the irony portion of the post we have the thoughts of Captain Douchehole himself, William Peaboday Q. Simmons the third. This comes from his annual NBA trade value column, which is really just an excuse for him to take a few cheap shots at the Lakers, talk about how much toughah and bettah the Celtics ahh, and write a lot of bad jokes about bad movies and TV shows (so really no different than anything else he writes):

Ty Lawson: I always get the definition of "irony" wrong, like most people, which makes me think that we should just change the meaning of the word to account for all the people who misuse it. So forgive me in advance. But doesn't it seem ironic in the traditionally wrong application of the definition that Ty Lawson -- the third point guard Minnesota drafted in 2009 (and immediately traded away) -- is better than the guys the Wolves drafted No. 5 and No. 6? That's totally what I think ironic means, even though it doesn't.

Besides being unfunny, stupid, and sickeningly self-congratulatory, you're also lazy. You and Chuck Klosterman were made for each other. If I had the money to make it happen I'd pay to get you both kidnapped, tied to the side of a rocket, and launched into deep space. Later in the same article:

A good test case for one of my favorite games (inspired by Chuck Klosterman): "Overrated, underrated or properly rated?" In the Internet era, we spend so much time dissecting things that it's hard to find something that's properly rated -- we either think someone's getting a little too much credit or not quite enough.

Fuck the both of you.

4 comments:

Adam said...

Get ready for this pukefest:

http://www.sportsbusinessdaily.com/Daily/Morning-Buzz/2011/02/18/simmons.aspx

Chris W said...

Of all the obnoxious things Simmons has written that ironic thing takes the cake. That's hardly even coincidental that a low draft pick outperformed higher draft picks.

Bengoodfella said...

This is very irritating. Somewhere, somehow the word has had its original meaning taken and now is supposed to either mean a person is adding emphasis or has come to mean what a person wants to do but they are exaggerating.

I am sure people use it on other ways, but using the word "literally" precludes a person from exaggerating since the entire definition of the word "literally" leaves no room for exaggeration. It is exactly what happened or what you wanted to happen.

I'm not even sure this made sense, but I say the world needs to take the word literally back from those who use it to exaggerate and misuse it.

SOB in CA said...

Nah. Just change the definition, so the idiots are right! Bill Simmons thinks that how we should define words. And he writes on the internet, so it must be true.

(Oh, and yeah, "sparse" is generous.)