Irony Exposed!

"An old man turned ninety-eight
He won the lottery and died the next day
It's a black fly in your Chardonnay
It's a death row pardon two minutes too late
Isn't it ironic ... don't you think?"
- Alanis Morisette

No, I don't.

While irony's precise meaning is difficult to pinpoint (and let's forget Socratic irony altogether), we can generally agree that it is marked by a deliberate contrast between apparent (literal) and intended meaning, whether in the form of a spoken phrase or a situation.

I bring Ms. Morisette's oldish song to the fore because it symbolizes the word's still rampant misuse. Just yesterday a colleague, referring to Thursday's plane crash in upstate New York, said "Ironic that one of the victims was a 9/11 widow." No, it is not ironic. There was no incongruity between an expectation of a reality and what actually happened. It is a coincidental shame that so much tragedy has been heaped upon one family, but far from ironic.

Similarly, a "black fly in your Chardonnay" is not within seven football fields of irony. The simplistic line is meant to cleverly juxtapose the third world and the refined. I suppose it does, in a seventh-grade-Intro-to-English-class way (see, student, if it landed in tap water it wouldn't have been such a cultural jolt!). But there's absolutely no contrast between surface and underlying meaning.

Now if I, a proud atheist, were to be struck and killed by lightning you could say that it's ironic. But since there is no God, and since all wise people know that lightning is caused by successive portions of air becoming a conductive discharge channel as the electrons and positive ions of air molecules are pulled away from each other and forced to flow in opposite directions, you'd be wrong again. So fuck off.