How is it that a word like irony comes to be so misunderstood? It’s written a lot on the internet, and people use it in their speech from time to time, but it often doesn’t seem to mean what people think it means.

No doubt for many members of Generation X, at least part of the problem with the word irony rests with an especially popular song which reared its head in the mid-’90s. Alanis Morissette’s (international) debut album Jagged Little Pill was ubiquitous during that time (it was the first album I bought on compact disc). If more recent listeners feel it now sounds a little cliché, that’s because this particular album initiated many of the styles which have since become exhausted by repetition. It was a big deal, and phenomenally original. The cherry on top of this pop-rock juggernaut was the biggest of its several hit singles, Ironic.

The song itself is undeniably catchy; the entire problem lies with its lyrics. A sequence of examples of supposed irony which, ironically, are not ironies at all. It is of course possible, even probable, that Morissette, a legitimate wunderkind, is a genius of the meta-narrative and was fucking with us all by embodying the ultimate expression of irony by creating a song about irony which contained no actual examples of irony and, therefore, is the literal opposite of an irony. That being basically what irony is in any other context but its own definition, it’s… ironic irony, perhaps? It’s the sort of unconfused-confusion many people who use the word “unironic” in 2020 seem to think they mean, but often don’t.

That the song manages to provide exactly zero examples of actual irony should make one wonder. That’s suspiciously harder to do than it sounds, especially if you don’t really know what you’re talking about. Which Morissette clearly does. The second-person anecdotal desires described in Wake Up—a song name with its own considerable implications—are all ironies. That’s also suspiciously difficult to do if you’re just dumping out whatever lyrical whimsies are bouncing around your skull. If these coincidences were compound interest there would be a substantial debt accruing at this point.

After all, the bridge to Ironic’s chorus goes, “isn’t it ironic, don’t you think?” As in, if you think about it, is this irony? To which the answer is simply, no. In the final refrain, she even goes so far as to say “and yeah, I really do think”. In this sense, she is asking philosophical questions with her song, not making a singular statement. What is irony? How many layers deep can you go?

Otherwise, why even ask the question?

The joke may be on those who take lyrics at face value, as literal statements, particularly critics whose task it is to spot these kinds of motifs. The song was lampooned endlessly of course—the satirical version I recall was called Moronic—and Morissette has well and truly paid her dues for that oversight, if it even was one. But regardless of intent, the song’s lyrics do express a very common phenomenon: that the popular understanding of irony is—or was, in the 1990s—usually incorrect.

In my experience, most people back then thought of an irony as something that was particularly poignant, an aptly symbolic or metaphorical failure; a “bummer”. But none of those things are ironic. They might embody the opposite expectation to what one may have presumed a given situation to be, but that doesn’t go quite far enough. A black fly in your chardonnay is a great visual contrast (and in my opinion also what you get for drinking such dross), but it sure isn’t an irony.

When the concept of irony is bandied about so liberally, a phrase like “un-ironic” sometimes translates to something like I take umbrage with whatever you just said, rather than “literally”. That is, a statement of opposition. And that, in turn, is because the word literally has become so misused that it only contributes to the confusion. Is there a more ironic example than the fact that the word “literally”, in a great deal of contemporary usage, has no real meaning at all but has become merely emphatic? This also suggests why un-ironic has risen in popularity in parallel with the extraneous use of 'literally’; it reflects the need for another word which literally means ‘literally’. Hence, ‘un-ironic’, a statement made without the intent to draw contrast or incongruity. Nothing which ‘literally’ wouldn’t actually fulfil perfectly well itself if it were employed correctly.

Here’s a quick test: remove ‘literally’ from a sentence and if the line still makes sense then the word is (dare I say it?) literally extraneous.

When our culture saturates our experience with particular buzz-words which have specific and nuanced meanings, they often become morphed or mutated by inaccuracy. That process is nothing new. It’s a natural part of linguistic change over time. Most people also can’t define a word like hubris off the top of their head, either. But they might feel, from time to time, confident enough to drop it into a sentence which seems similar enough to a previous context to get away with it. Within a culture which largely doesn’t know any better, that can pretty quickly perpetuate inaccuracies.

None of which is necessarily much of a problem, until the misuse of such a word reaches a degree of prevalence which comes close to replacing the actual meaning of the word. In which case it becomes a semiotic issue rather than just a linguistic one. That is to say that anyone using the word correctly may well be misunderstood by more people than not, despite the speaker’s actual understanding of its definition.

This, in my view, is also why irony is an especially problematic tool in the context of political arguments. It can be (and frequently is, for this reason) deployed in ways which consciously perpetuate disingenuous ideas under the guise of “humour”, knowing full well it could easily be interpreted literally. It is a weird hybrid of quasi-populism (in the sense of its typical deployment as satire) fused with in-group élitism (an actual irony in the case of anti-élitists) masquerading as intellectual insight. But its purpose is akin to advertising; if the speaker is just a little bit smarter than their audience then even bald-faced fallacies can sound like wisdom. The actual point is to obfuscate a particular truth from people who simply take it at face value (like music critics), or as a clever joke.

As the song Ironic itself suggests, it can often be quite difficult to spot satire in some circumstances, especially without an eye for nuance or context. And many people will never see it as satire at all, but rather as a statement.

A word like villain qualifies as a good historical example for outside context. It is derived from the archaic French term villein, which basically means ‘serf’ (an indentured worker, or slave). Once upon a time, a persistent criminal and a lowborn servant were conceptually synonymous. Of course they were; we all know that poor people are the only underhanded thieves and rakes in the world.

Anyway, that’s what the Norman aristocracy who actually spoke French in England at that time thought; the powerless, often illiterate serfs themselves retained a language which would later become Middle English. So for a while, the two meanings of villein were both (at least figuratively) true at the same time amongst the beneficiaries of the langue (the nobility and landed gentry). Over the proceeding centuries, the ‘serf’ aspect from which the ‘criminal’ aspect was originally derived disappeared entirely.

The word villain became so closely tied to a particular cultural trope that it eventually became a literary trope as well, at which point the original literary meaning was abandoned to the contemporary definition by sheer semiotic pressure. We now think of a villain as a figurehead antagonist, not someone toiling in a field somewhere.

And so it is with ironies. Literally.