Sarcasm 101

I have a friend, whom I’m not entirely sure I like. She claims she is a blatantly honest person (she says that’s a good thing); however, I would argue that she is just more sarcastic than anything. When I first came to Australia, I wasn’t aware that sarcasm is such an acceptable and common form of expression. It must be a cultural thing, because I know in America sarcasm is considered rather rude. In America it is not as common; therefore, I find it extremely difficult to tell when people are telling me something with a sarcastic tone. Especially this friend, for her sake we will call her something other than her real name, let’s use Caitlin. Caitlin has a habit of responding to me with, “Silly American.” 

The first case was when we were cleaning up after a meal and Caitlin asked me to grab the “cling wrap” from the cupboard. “Cling wrap?” I responded, “What’s cling wrap?” So as you can put together she responded with, “silly American,” while she opened the cabinet and showed me what I was familiar with as, “Saran Wrap.” 

This of all the scenarios’ is definitely the least offensive; my aim isn’t to make her out as a bad person or anything. Anyhow, it took me ages to realize that she intentionally does this as a way to express her thoughts that I am a “stupid American.” Her indefinitely skilful way of being sarcastic is indescribable.  This ambiguity in the sarcastic comments is always resolved by her intonation or "tone of voice" (Woodland & Voyer, 2011, pp. 229). The way she says things, her facial expressions, her hand gestures really indeed get her “obvious” message across. 

In this week’s reading I found the perfect quote to sum up what Caitlin has mastered, “sarcasm is characterized by the intentional production of an overt and separate message” (Haiman, 1998:42).  I also found myself another helpful source that could help with my sarcasm! Who knows, maybe it will help you too!
Enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLc8RIdRzio

Wierzbicka, A 2002, ‘Australian cultural scripts—bloody revisited’, Journal of Pragmatics, vol. 34, pp1167–1209.

Woodland, J. & Voyer, D. 2011, "Context and Intonation in the Perception of Sarcasm, Metaphor, and Symbol," 26:3, 227-239.

Sex in the workplace?

 I took this in a bit of a different direction but I think it still completely applies to our themes, please consider: in regards to the video clip. Envision yourself many many years from now being married and discovering that your wife has cheated on you, it is agreeable that this would be difficult and hard to understand. How would you make sense of this?  Garfinkel would argue that people would try to make sense of that situation, by behaving the way to do (maybe like the co-workers in the video).  People are always producing meaning or stocks of knowledge and information in order to acquire meaningfulness out of particular situations. 

This can be related to Garfinkel's breaching experiments but we can also attribute this to Gestalts theory of, “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” This man is trying to fill in information in an unfamiliar situation, “my wife cheated on me, what do I do?” in order to make sense of things. This man has to treat it as an interpretive matter by the process of producing order with this woman (Rawls, 2008, p.702). This is rather interesting because this week’s reading states that the workplace has its own unwritten rules, generally not to be deviant of those rules (Wieder, 1974). Yet, in the video it is clear that we still choose to be deviant. For example, in the video, having sexual relations with a co-worker is usually a do not do kind of rule, but here it seems so casual. 

However, it is important to consider that these codes or rules are not regulated; they are constitutive by trying to always ascribe sense to things. There is no such thing as a senseless situation. I really like how this weeks reading from Wieder, "Telling the code," related so very closely to Garfinkel's idea of trying to make a senseless situation in his breaching experiments. I suppose that was my whole point in showing that video... that it contained a sort of theme of both breaching and telling the code. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjZHO1oUrZs
 

References:

Rawls, A W. 2008, “Harold Garfinkel, ethnomethodology and workplace studies,” in Organization Studies, Sage Publications, Los Angeles, pp 701-732. 

Wieder, D L 1974, “Telling the code,” in R Turner (ed.), Ethnomethodology: Selected Readings, Penguin Education, Harmondsworth, pp 144-172.

Comment to Laura Bergmann

This is the link of my comment to Laura Bergmann's post:

http://eyeonpeople.blogspot.com.au/2012/09/breaking-rules-of-reality.html?showComment=1346915905181#c4628714654511393806