In baffling antwacky rents, the 13-year-old author of The A-Z of Teen Talk does not lack irony.

They're utterly lacking irony.

Trond Waage, the Cabinet-level Commissioner for Children in Norway, said young people not weaned on American media lacked the detachment and irony necessary to deal with harsh or manipulative messages.

Edgar Lee Masters found Riley's work to be superficial, claiming it lacked irony and that he had only a "narrow emotional range".

"The American view," she said, "lacks irony."

With any other pen Hay might have been tempted to add, "and my congratulations to Platt and Quay who have given us you, a precious gift," but the silver pen lacked iron as well as irony.

He utterly lacked Lisztian irony or ease.

Birkerts is quite correct in identifying irony as the deadly sin of our age, but this is not to say that a lack of irony is desirable, and Birkerts's essays do, unfortunately, lack both irony and bite, and will probably not find many readers outside the literary world.

Reading Drake's account, one wonders whether Saint Laurent became increasingly marginal not because of the drugs and alcohol that seem most obviously to blame but on account of his earnest devotion to a shape-shifting cause for which he lacked the cynicism and irony that the subsequent decades would require.

Still, Stephen Pederson of The Chronicle Herald was bitingly critical of the play, saying that it lacked irony, calling it melodramatic and excessively moralizing in tone, and comparing it to the morality plays of the Middle Ages.