How to recognize irony

It is the fact that there is no linguistic marker to introduce irony which makes its identification so difficult. The playwright Tom Stoppard is quoted as saying that there should be a typeface for irony since readers so often fail to recognise it and thereby either misunderstand the speaker’s words or regard him as a liar! The need for irony to be recognised is obvious: if we attribute to a speaker thoughts or opinions that he does not hold then we are misrepresenting him, and in biblical text this is very serious.—Margaret Sim, A Relevant Way to Read, 54–55