Merriam-Webster - What Ironic Really Means lyrics

Welcome to Ask the Editor. I'm Kory Stamper, an Associate Editor at Merriam-Webster. Back in 1996, singer Alanis Morrissette released a song called "Ironic" that included a list of things—like rain on your wedding day—that she called "ironic." It's a marvel that this song, released during the Internet equivalent of the early Cretaceous period, still inspires online arguments about the word "ironic." The claim of her critics is this: that for an event to be truly ironic, it must exhibit what is called "situational irony." Situational irony involves a striking reversal of what is expected or intended. So, I hop over my dog to avoid tripping and hurting myself, and in doing so, I trip and hurt myself—that's situational irony. The word "ironic," the critics say, does not describe odd or coincidental events and has a more specific meaning, and people need to understand that. Well, someone may have forgotten to tell the people "ironic" has been used vaguely at best for a good 150 years. Take this 1939 quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald: "It is an ironic thought that the last picture job I took yielded me five thousand dollars five hundred and cost over four thousand in medical attention." Is this situational irony? Some would say, "Yes; he expected to keep the money he made," and some would say, "No; it's only true situational irony if he loses the money on another film project." You see how fuzzy the idea of reversal is. Perhaps Fitzgerald just means it's "tragic" or "odd" or "curious." What matters to lexicographers is that many people, like Fitzgerald, have been using "ironic" in a similar way for a while. The adverb "ironically" is already defined in our dictionaries as referring to curious or surprising events, because it's been used that way since the 19th century. It's just a matter of time before the narrow definitions of "irony" and "ironic" are similarly broadened. We'll let the Internet figure out if that'll constitute situational irony. For more episodes of Ask the Editor, visit our site merriam-webster.com