Search the web (over the wide world) for pages containing the phrase “… fills a much-needed hole” (and “… fills a much-needed void” and determine the percentage of occurance where the author, instead of realizing that the phrase is negative and sarcastic, employs the words as a compliment.
This realization came to me in a music history class, where the professor of said class, a friend of logic paradoxes like myself, used the above phrase to describe a composer’s body of work. I don’t remember the specifics, but he said something akin to, “Composer Jean-Rousseau Torino Friedrich Smith’s Metamorphin’ Power Fantasy in G-flat fills a much-needed hole in the Saturday morning Romantic-era cartoon orchestra genre,” except with a more legitimate composer and a worse piece of music.
This professor was someone I admired a bit. I was in his office one day, and on his bookshelf was one of my favorites, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. I mentioned that I enjoyed the text and dramatizations within the book, and he confessed to not understanding most of it. Heh. The book is great, dealing with correlations between mathematics, art, music, computer programming, artificial intelligence, Zen, and genetics, with a touch of Lewis Carroll.
Get it? It’s the hole that is much-needed, not the work.
You cheapened the whole thing by explaining it at the end. If your audience doesn’t understand, then they’re not MEANT to understand. 🙂