More likely Elmer Fudd in more people's imagination

Funny how that worked. Bugs called him Nimrod, a great hunter, sarcastically. Everyone today uses it to mean stupid/inept in any situation.

Akin to one day, Einstein being known mostly as meaning 'idiot' rather than a physicist.

Bugs Bunny is the source of a lot of weird misconceptions.

Example: people think rabbits mostly eat carrots because Bugs Bunny likes to snack on them while leaning on something and saying "What's up, Doc?". Except Bugs doing that was a reference to a movie where Clark Gable... ate carrots while leaning on a fence and calling people Doc.

And somehow a parody of a Clark Gable movie turned into most people believing that carrots are a staple of leporine diets.

> people think rabbits mostly eat carrots because Bugs Bunny likes to snack on them

If that is the case, why is the misconception also widespread in countries where Bugs Bunny wasn't part of the popular culture? E.g. USSR/Russia.

Rabbits do actually love carrots.

I believe it’s more of American thing to put the opposite meaning into a word.

Universal human trait.

Look up the history of the word "nice" in England, sometime. But no, it is not just an English-speaking phenomenon, either.

Right, irony and sarcasm are universal (afaik). But I had in mind that americans tend to use e.g. “so bad” in a sense of “so good”, which is not so ubiquitous. (I’m only familiar with English, Russian, Deutsch and Tatar really, so my thought is limited to these four.)

One summer when I was at Bloomberg, there was an announcement that some interns had been assigned to implement an internet sarcasm detector, and that they had been completely successful. No one questioned it.

BTW when I told my wife about this, she thought I meant they had been completely successful.