A survey from 2016 that contained the same sentence was deemed problematic by 63 percent of the panel, a figure that is lower than the earlier one but still a majority. In 1978, 78 percent of the panel rejected this usage. The sentence uses the word “ironically” to describe this outcome. The panel has been asked repeatedly to weigh in on the acceptability of a sentence that describes a woman from Ithaca, New York, who moves to California, where she meets and marries a man who is also from upstate New York. Resistance to such uses remain strong.” The usage note is buttressed with data from the dictionary’s usage panel, a group of nearly two hundred journalists, creative writers, and scholars who complete annual surveys on the “acceptability” of word senses and grammatical constructions.
The American Heritage Dictionary provides a usage note for “ironic” that addresses this distinction: “Sometimes, people misapply ironic, irony, and ironically to events and circumstances that might better be described as simply coincidental or improbable, with no particular lessons about human vanity or presumption. Other disapproving voices have weighed in on this issue. Not every coincidence, curiosity, oddity and paradox is an irony, even loosely.” It is interesting to note that in the 1999 edition there followed another sentence that has been omitted from the current edition: “And where irony does exist, sophisticated writing counts on the reader to recognize it.” Perhaps the editors of the guide realized they were fighting a losing battle on that point?Įquating irony with coincidence is still viewed - at least in some quarters - as a semantic transgression, although attitudes appear to be softening.
IRONY IN THE PEDESTRIAN MANUAL
The 2015 edition of The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage states that “the looser use of irony and ironically, to mean an incongruous turn of events, is trite. The first edition of “Fowler’s Modern English Usage” (1926) claims that “a protest is needed against the application … of ‘irony’ … to every trivial oddity.” Seventy years later, the third edition admitted that “this weakened use looks as if it has come to stay,” and the fourth edition, published in 2015, refers darkly to “vague, watered down newer meanings” of irony. The battle over equating irony and coincidence has been raging for some time. In short, the family resemblance between coincidence and irony makes them more like cousins than siblings. Coincidences may involve victims, humor, or criticism, but they are rarely truly humorous or poignant. They may allude to failed expectations, but they aren’t explicit echoes. Coincidences involve juxtaposition and incongruity, but they aren’t counterfactual and don’t involve pretense. From a family resemblance perspective, we might say that the concept of coincidence overlaps to some degree with the irony concept, but the number of attributes the two share is low.
For them, it represents a form of imprecision that debases the language - an unforced error that one should scrupulously avoid. Referring to coincidences as ironic raises the hackles of prescriptivists, who regard such usage with clear distaste. But does that make such juxtapositions ironic? And does it truly matter what we call them?
Things happen all the time, and sometimes things happen at the same time. For example, someone might rhetorically exclaim, “Isn’t it ironic that the rain stopped just as I was finishing my morning run?” In many such instances, “coincidence” would probably be a better descriptor, particularly when no greater meaning or import connects the two events. In everyday conversation, the term “coincidence” is often used as a synonym for situational irony. But exactly how does irony differ from related concepts like coincidence, paradox, satire, and parody? Coincidence The term has been applied to a number of different phenomena over time, and as a label, it has been stretched to accommodate a number of new senses. A song about irony is mocked because its lyrics contain non-ironic examples. A North Korean dictator bans sarcasm directed at him and his regime because he fears that people are only agreeing with him ironically. An American president posts a tweet containing the phrase “Isn’t it ironic?” and is derided for misusing the term. Uncertainty about irony can be found almost everywhere. This article is excerpted from Roger Kreuz’s book “ Irony and Sarcasm.”
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