I’m not, I think, an especially sarcastic person but I find it useful from time to time to remind myself of the origin of the word. So I resolve when I catch myself using sarcasm, or hear others doing so, to remember what happened to the satyr Marsyas. He did not, to be sure, use sarcasm in his musical competition with Apollo, but when he lost, his punishment was what the Greeks called sarkasmos, flaying, the stripping of skin off the body. That’s how sarcasm makes us feel, as Ovid describes it:
“Even as he shrieked out in his agony,
his living skin was ripped off from his limbs,
till his whole body was a flaming wound,
with nerves and veins and viscera exposed.
But all the weeping people of that land,
and all the Fauns and Sylvan Deities,
and all the Satyrs, and Olympus, his
beloved pupil—even then renowned in song,
and all the Nymphs, lamented his sad fate;
and all the shepherds, roaming on the hills,
lamented as they tended fleecy flocks.”
(Ovid Metamorphoses 6. 382 ff. tr. More, modified.)
In its place I resolve to use satire, following the lead of the Century Dictionary which tells me, “The essential thing about sarcasm is its cutting edge ; it therefore is intensely concentrated, lying in a sentence or a phrase ; it is used to scourge the follies or foibles or vices of men, but has little of reformatory purpose. Satire is more elaborate than sarcasm, is not necessarily bitter, and has, presumably, some aim at the reformation of that which is satirized.“
Wish me luck!
“Even as he shrieked out in his agony,
his living skin was ripped off from his limbs,
till his whole body was a flaming wound,
with nerves and veins and viscera exposed.
But all the weeping people of that land,
and all the Fauns and Sylvan Deities,
and all the Satyrs, and Olympus, his
beloved pupil—even then renowned in song,
and all the Nymphs, lamented his sad fate;
and all the shepherds, roaming on the hills,
lamented as they tended fleecy flocks.”
(Ovid Metamorphoses 6. 382 ff. tr. More, modified.)
In its place I resolve to use satire, following the lead of the Century Dictionary which tells me, “The essential thing about sarcasm is its cutting edge ; it therefore is intensely concentrated, lying in a sentence or a phrase ; it is used to scourge the follies or foibles or vices of men, but has little of reformatory purpose. Satire is more elaborate than sarcasm, is not necessarily bitter, and has, presumably, some aim at the reformation of that which is satirized.“
Wish me luck!