Sarcasm vs. Sincerity
You want to make a short post online, or send a short text. But in our sarcasm rich world a brief statement may mean what it says, or mean the opposite...
To denote sincerity (as opposed to sarcasm) we can soften the statement. Ironically, to show we really mean it we can make the statement less declarative.
Huey Lewis is awesome.
Huey Lewis is pretty good.
Without the information of tone and gesture to go by the first is as likely as not to be sarcastic. The second seems sincere because it is too moderate to function as sarcasm, so it must be straightforward.
(I was thinking about this because I wanted to praise a post and found myself softening my praise so that it could not be taken for sarcasm.)
= new reply since forum marked as read
Someone had been telling everyone in my graduating class that I was gay. Which I am not. I wasn't really upset about it (it's sort of like if they were telling everyone I had taken up gymnastics - my reaction was "what? huh? Me? A gymnast? Where did THAT come from?"
So i called my friend Janice and asked "why is Jeff, the reunion organizer, telling people I'm gay?" She started laughing, and when she stopped to breathe, she said "because at the end of the last reunion, he asked why a pretty girl like you had never married, and you didn't turn around or acknowledge him, you just said 'because I'm gay, Jeff' and kept talking to whoever you were talking to."
Another time I was at work on Fat Tuesday, wearing Mardi Gras beads that came in a cake a client sent us. Someone asked "where did you get those beads?" and I said "I was flashing guys down on South Street right before those riots last night". I'm middle aged. Really middle aged. I haven't been on South Street in 20 year. But during lunch, people were talking about the riots, and I heard "oh, ask Patiod - she was there last night". (head bang) No, no, I really wasn't.
I've been that way all my life - not an attractive quality, I know. No one in my family is sarcastic, but I am from the Northeast, where it's a little more predominant than elsewhere in the country, so maybe it's that. But it bites me in the ass every time.
Hey, count your blessings. You get to be sarcastic without having to pay for it, while I, as a kid, regularly got 5 kinds of shit beaten out of me by classmates until my desperate parents enrolled me in a self-defence course 
