a war of battles and decisions in the old style, over, like the Europeanones of the mid-nineteenth century, in a matter of weeks or months.The military mind, whose nature it is always to think of the presentin terms of the past, had utterly failed to appreciate the revolutionarychange in the nature of warfare...(p.384)In other words, in 1914, Europe had a well-established event script forwar. One of the many aspects of WWI that did not fit the script was theslow and indecisive trench warfare. Then, just as the psychological theorywould predict, “A vast literature has been produced in the attempt to bringit [WWI] into line with other wars by highlighting its so-called battles bysuch impressive names as Loos, Verdun, the Somme and Passchendaele. . . ” (Wingfield-Stratford, 1968, p. 386). This misalignment of WWI to thewar script does not strike us as particularly ironic, however. Conceptualcompensation is made, rather than irony highlighted. All script anomaliesare not ironic.Joan Lucariello (1994) investigated the relationship between situa-tional irony and event scripts. She proposed that situational irony wasa specific kind of script-anomalous event, not simply an unexpected ele-ment. To test this hypothesis, Lucariello condensed and revised Muecke’s(1969) literary taxonomy of irony into 7 categories with 27 subcategories(e.g.,role reversals,self-betrayal,loss/loss recurrence). She then conducted aseries of experiments to find out whether or not na ̈ıve adult subjects couldboth reliably produce and classify ironic situations using the taxonomy. Shefound they could, and she concluded that ironic situations are related tononironiceventscripts.Butironicsituationsareculturallyrecognizedtypesof deviations from scripts, with conceptual coherence that distinguishesthem from simple anomalies. In other words, the ironic situation is not justunexpected. It also fits patterns that we have learned to recognize as ironic.