While I’m on the subject, let me speak of Alanis Morrisette. Lots of folk tried to show how smart they were by pointing out that Alanis’s misuse of the word “irony.” “Irony,” they said, “means the use of words to express something different from and often opposite to their literal meaning.”
Sometimes words have more than one meaning, however. In her song “Isn’t it Ironic,” Alanis is clearly using another legitimate use of the word “ironic,” which is “incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs.”
Scott at MellowFellow has a more intelligent explanation. Unfortunately, his analysis rests on the weak argument that what Alanis expects is illogical to expect. As humans frequently expect things that are illogical, this makes no never-mind.
For example, with regard to the lyric “an old man turned ninety-eight / He won the lottery and died the next day,” Scott says:
Winning the lottery brings the expectation of financial well-being. It does not equate to physical health nor imply physical well-being. Clearly, a 98 year-old man has an increased chance of dying. Therefore, his death is not unexpected.
But emotionally, perhaps, the man expected to live in luxury the rest of his days? Surely he and everyone around him did. But he died immediately, before having a chance to enjoy any of his winnings. That is ironic: Scott errs by focusing on rational mathematical probabilities the emotional, human expectations of the situation.
Another example: “It’s a black fly in your chardonnay.” Scott says:
Although having a fly in your wine is an unfortunate occurrence, it is by no means ironic. The glass of chardonnay does not preclude invasion of winged pests. In fact, one may argue that the wine’s aroma may attract a fly in search of food.
Scott ignores the symbolic content of the line: the chardonnay implies luxury and sophistication, whereas the fly implies filth and decay. If you sit down to a nice glass of chardonnay, you are expecting a sophisticated beverage. If you find a fly in it, it becomes polluted. If this were a painting, certainly some art critic would call it “ironic.”
Finally, of the oft-maligned lyric “It’s like rain on your wedding day,” Scott points out:
A wedding day is supposed to be festive event. Clearly, rain on this day may hamper the joyous occasion. However, there is no reason to expect that sunny weather and a wedding day will necessarily coincide. Therefore, this is not ironic. In some cultures, rain on your wedding day is a welcome sign of fertility.
Again, Scott is overly mathematical. In Western European and American culture rain is frequently seen as a genuine downer. For a very long time, rain has been used to evoke feelings of depression in English and American literature, and is frequently used to externalize the internal tragic feelings of characters. Rain is for funerals and Republican administrations.
To have rain on your wedding day is ironic because one expects everything to be “bright and sunny” on the “happiest of days” even if there’s no scientific reason to think so. That other cultures think rain on one’s wedding day is a good omen is irrelevant; culture and language are so varied that few songs can convey the same thing to all peoples using the same metaphors.
None of this changes the fact that banshees fear mortality when they hear Alanis “sing.” But at least she does know her literary terms better than those pretentious folk who savage her.
