The problem is, these ironies and meta-ironies are just as old, trite, tiring, and grating as the same thing meant seriously. Believe me, meta-irony on this topic has been done before, many times, and not only based on the irony of an xkcd comic.
It might be the first time you do this, and you think it's funny, clever, and 'meta-ironic' (oooh). I suppose it's somewhat like lists of jokes that people forward around: funny the first few times, and "I'm going to auto-killfile this" after a few years of hearing the same ones.
0) I've always been extremely strong in English. I tended to get high marks in it, and according to IQ tests and the SAT, my greatest strengths are in language. Pointers gave me some trouble, the * in declarations strikes me as a terrible syntax, and corners of C syntax in general often strike me as poorly chosen. Despite this, my experience does not mimic yours, either in the trouble I had with pointers, or the eventual resolution. One day, it just clicked, and I rarely made mistakes with it again. It came to me naturally after I took a break from C and picked up Python: once I was confident in the difference between a, array[a], array[a][b], etc, in both construction and accessing in python (I originally did a mental auto-squashing similar to that in Perl, despite not knowing Perl), pointers were no longer problematic. For what it's worth, I was a self-taught newbie at this point.
1) Pointers are not ints. Casting between pointers and ints is BROKEN, as they are not the same size on many platforms, including my primary one, amd64 with linux+gcc. Please, please don't advocate doing this, or thinking about it this way.
