How to explain it?

[jsbowden]

We went to the Maryland Science Center in Baltimore's Inner Harbor yesterday, and they had this Titanic exhibition. Evan enjoyed the exhibit. A lot. He talked about it all the way home.

I told him about the Olympic and the Britannic (Gigantic) and that they were less famous, but used the same basic hull design and also fell to disaster. I was wrong about the Olympic, I didn't realize it hadn't sunk, but had merely collided with everything in the Atlantic before finally being retired and cut up in 1935. I explained that the Titanic was famous not because it sank, lots of ships have sank, but because it sank on it's maiden voyage, after having been touted as 'unsinkable' by the companies that built and operated it. He doesn't know the word irony, and it's not an easy concept to get across, but he did say that it was funny that the unsinkable ship sank on it's first voyage. He knows it's not funny 'hah hah'; lots of people died, but he's aware that there's something in the scenario that's not quite what it seems.

I'm just not sure how you explain irony to a six year old. He obviously gets situational irony at some basic level, see above, but I have no idea how to convey the other concepts the word encompasses.

In unexpected bits of news, while I was typing this up, I got a phone call. Apparently my Roofless Vehicle of German Descent arrived at the dealer this morning.

Comments

[deza.livejournal.com]

tall_man and I were discussing irony this weekend, and I used the story of Oedipus to explain it. If Oedipus' parents hadn't heard the prophecy and then exposed him; if Oedipus hadn't tried to escape the same prophecy by running away from the home where he was raised; then he never would have fulfilled the prophecy of killing his father and marrying his mother.