irony

All right, it's the weekend and I don't feel like writing much, so I'll just gripe a bit about a word that is misused extremely frequently. People use "irony" to describe occurrences that are merely coincidental or strange, when the word in fact signifies some kind of contradiction or any expression that means the opposite of what is technically said. Alanis Morissette's "Ironic," in particular, misuses the word. Very few of the scenarios in that song are genuinely ironic; "Ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife," is the only correct one that I can recall - to have such an excess of silverware but still find one's self unprepared for a steak is somewhat ironic. Perhaps the fact that the song is ostensibly about irony but employs very little of it is meant to be the true irony. That would work. But the song would still suck.