Oh the irony

While wandering through the mall the other day, I overheard a conversation between two college-aged girls that made me die a little on the inside. The first girl said to the other: “So, Brad broke up with me last week, and then he asked my cousin out the next day. Isn’t that ironic?” Not wanting to cause a scene in the middle of Target, I refrained from interjecting, but what I wanted to yell across the purses was: “No, in fact it isn’t.”

Such is our modern misunderstanding of irony. Whether it is lost boyfriends or wedding-day rain, everything nowadays is mistaken as completely and utterly ironic. Most people don’t understand irony any more than they do quantum physics, yet I continue to overhear that something is “filled with irony” or is “totally ironic.” Enough already. I can’t understand how in this time when irony seems to pop up everywhere, no one seems to be quite certain of just what it is. Ironic, isn’t it?

Or is it?

Irony comes from the Greek “eironeia”, meaning “feigned ignorance.” The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines irony as “an incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result.”  The confusion lies in the incongruity. Lots of things in life are inconsistent, like that girl’s boyfriend who left her for her cousin, or the president who dines in fine restaurants while his people starve. Yet, while both of these situations show a serious incongruity between ideology and application, they are not necessarily ironic. For something to be ironic, it must be the opposite of what it is expected to be.

Irony is not, as we are often told (thanks Alanis Morissette), “a black fly in your chardonnay.” Irony is the man who spends his life crusading for endangered species only to be mauled to death by a Siberian Tiger. Things that are truly ironic force us to stop and think because something inside tells us that what happened was not what we were expecting. As orderly beings we notice contrast. We pick up on inconsistencies and when we see them, they fascinate us. That is why irony – true irony – is so beautiful, because it calls attention to the fact that the rules we set and the expectations that we make can be broken.

Call me an English snob, and you would be right. But isn’t it about time someone stood up for the unassuming five-letter word that seems to leave even the highly educated baffled? Words come to mean the things that we take them to mean, and all that I am saying is that it would be a shame for the sense of wonder that accompanies the truly ironic to get lost in the hypocritical, coincidental shuffle.

Perhaps the greatest irony of all is this lack of any irony. We exclaim to friends that the happenings of our everyday life are so ironic, yet we can’t seem to wrap our heads around what that really means. Now isn’t that ironic? Yes, yes it is.