Thad Matta has no clue what ironic means
http://sports.espn.go.com/ncb/recap?gameId=310600213
OSU did us a big favor by de-pantsing PSU yesterday. 3bler had 10!! 3-pointers in the game. This quote from Matta was a little confusing though:
"Ironically, I told him in shootaround, 'We need a big night from you tonight. You're going to get your shots," Buckeyes coach Thad Matta said.Um...why is that ironic coach? He is just doing what he is paid to do. Bazinga!
and doesn't want to look foolish.
You're right. The "malapropism" part I hypothesized was "stretching" things. (Though I actually admitted that in that same post.)
But the point remains that a song entitled "Ironic" is perfectly ironically named if it carries zero lyrical irony. In that situation, "ironic" is apropos, then. Or, to reiterate this point in a third way, it is a good title (even the song itself is below average).
Maybe Alanis landed on that by mistake, who knows, but anyone who claims that the song is dumbly titled because they think the title is not ironic is not only flatly wrong but is either ignorant of or cognitively dissonant to the definition of irony. Well, I guess there's at least one more option: the person might also not recognize that a song with ironic lyrics with the title "Ironic" isn't so much ironic as it is "About Irony."
I think most people just think "irony" is interchangeable with the word "coincidentally", which of course it's not. But then if we get into a linguistics discussion, at what point does the actual meaning of the word change? What if 95% of the population uses the word to mean coincidentally? The meaning of words or phrases change all the time, and usually it's a result of a dwindling number of people who enforce the old (or correct you might say) meaning over time.
Words can change, and as we are the ones who get to write that big book full of their definitions (as opposed to the trees or rocks or platypi), "we" are surely the ones with the privilege to change them. Still, it seems there are rules for the changing of words.
For one, we recognize that any word can have for itself many connotations. For instance "the crown" can mean a circular golden do-dad, or it can connote the power of the king (metonyms; ditto: "gathering"[v.] and "gathering"[n.]). Also, "You're killing me" can either reflect a gruesome or a mildly annoying thing (litotes). And "the White House" can denote either a prettily designed home on Pennsylvania Ave. or the US Government itself (synecdoche: I think this is an example of that, at least).
For another: Words can change over time, but they do so in patterns. For instance, their change-in-definition (1) can often occur in multiple languages simultaneously and (2) follows a pattern of change in logic. Regarding #2, my favorite examples are the words "silly", "pathetic", and "gay." Silly used to mean "blessed", but since blessed folks own piety and pious folks own innocence and since sometimes examples of 'the innocent' are only examples of 'those too incompetent to know how to be any other way'...the word gained new meaning. Pathetic used to mean "one who feels" (greek: pathos) or "empathizes" or "is kind" but slowly got morphed into its uglier pejorative form because modern man (as in male human) found "feeling" to be beneath him and worth suppressing. "Gay" once meant thrilled and euphoric, but as euphoria can often be linked with indiscretion and hedonism and sin; so, did the word...and the rest is its history.
Anyway: With "irony", I don't see these kinds of patterns. Instead, I see a word being misused not because the society reading about the word is changing around it as much as because the society around the word isn't reading about it. If that makes any sense. I mean Dictionaries aren't exactly en vogue these days, I guess.
Still on "irony": I could be wrong about it's evolution, of course. Maybe it is not changing just because people are misusing it (like I've said here) and I'm just missing the forest for the trees. Wouldn't be the first time. Still,..I think what I think. And either way: maybe I represent a stodgy sect when it comes to words, but I like that sect's rules. And when it comes to rules about words, as is the case with rules about human art, though they might seem at face value to be constricting, they're just there to help give us a standard by which to communicate our mind's jumble of ideas with that other mind over there...and in that way are quite the opposite of constricting. Liberating and creativity-beckoning come to mind.