Stop Picking on Alanis!

Cidu Bill on Oct 3rd 2009

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How is this even remotely ironic?

Filed in Alanis Morissette, Bill Bickel, Non Sequitur, Wiley Miller, comic strips, comics, humor, irony | 38 responses so far

38 Responses to “Stop Picking on Alanis!”

  1. Rainey Oct 3rd 2009 at 07:37 pm 1

    Irony means that something unexpected happens. I doubt very much that the man sitting in the chair is expecting to be hit with an Indian club. Otherwise, he would be wearing a helmet.
    P.S. Actually, the word “ironically” is redundant. It’s like saying you will be killed dead.

  2. Josh Oct 3rd 2009 at 07:48 pm 2

    I think the irony here arises from the idea that he is specifically asking to know his future. Despite being told what it is (and therefore knowing to expect it), he is still going to be surprised by it, hence a bit of situational irony. There’s also some degree of dramatic irony, since the guy doesn’t know the importance of the “see it coming” pun, but we do.

  3. Cidu Bill Oct 3rd 2009 at 08:23 pm 3

    If “irony” meant simply “something unexpected,” then we wouldn’t have a separate word for it.

  4. Kevin A Oct 3rd 2009 at 09:25 pm 4

    Right, irony is more about the expected *not* happening, and how what does happen is so completely-not-in-line with that. This can be in a sentence that looks like it should mean one thing but means something completely different. Or it can be a person eating a lot of carrots to improve his eyesight only to lose it from some newfangled optically damaging carrot pesticide.

    Here we have the client being told he’ll be hit on the head. Yet, it is still going to be a complete surprise. So, Wiley’s saying the guy would normally expect to expect to receive the blow; but he won’t expect it and will be surprised. Applying the word “irony” to the expectation of the happening of an expectation…, well I can’t be absolutely sure it’s incorrect.

  5. Tim Oct 3rd 2009 at 11:06 pm 5

    The irony is that something he didn’t see coming would happen while being told his fortune. I think there actually is a certain irony in that.

  6. mike Oct 3rd 2009 at 11:56 pm 6

    The irony is that if he hadn’t gone to have his fortune told he wouldn’t have been hit on the head. the fortune teller and the head-hitter are in cahoots, and it’s a scam. the irony is that the fortune is self-fulfilling.

    which is not to say that I don’t generally object to the overuse of the word “irony”

  7. Mark in Boston Oct 4th 2009 at 12:15 am 7

    “Irony” is one of those words that certain people get all worked up over the misuse of — the same people who get upset if you use a preposition to end a sentence with. According to one “expert”, irony is a literary device only. If a character in a novel takes medicine to cure a cold and dies from a side effect of the medicine, that’s irony. If it happens in real life, it’s not.

  8. Cidu Bill Oct 4th 2009 at 12:24 am 8

    Mark, there’s a difference: One case is a grammatical rule that’s generally considered outdated. The other is the matter of a word that has a particular definition — using it to mean something different is objectively just wrong.

  9. Norbert Oct 4th 2009 at 12:25 am 9

    Irony is the contrast between appearance and reality. This type of irony is situational irony, the contrast between expectation and outcome. I would agree that it is the fortune teller angle that creates the irony, since she is in the process of telling what will happen to him.

    As this comic demonstrates, irony is not always funny.

  10. furrykef Oct 4th 2009 at 02:03 am 10

    I would define irony as a perverse reversal. Examples:
    * Trying to do something and, in so doing, causing the opposite to happen.
    ** Dousing something in fluid to prevent a fire. Oops, it was gasoline. The place ignites.
    ** You think you’re having a heart attack and you take an ambulance to the hospital. The ambulance crashes and you die. It turned out you weren’t having a heart attack, so if you didn’t take the ambulance, you would have lived.
    * Being hoisted by your own petard.
    ** The guy who commissioned the brazen bull — a particularly cruel method of execution in ancient times — was executed in it.
    ** A tobacco exec who spends his life promoting cigarettes and dies of lung cancer or emphysema.

    There are other kinds of examples, I’m sure, but I’m too lazy to think of them.

    Anyway, as for the comic itself, technically, it’s impossible to say whether she’s using “ironically” correctly because we don’t know what she said beforehand. You can’t just blindly assume that the context is unironic. Although it’s admittedly unlikely, given the joke.

    - Kef

  11. mkilby Oct 4th 2009 at 02:22 am 11

    The irony in this comic is concomitant with the breaking of the “fourth wall”. It does not exist in the physical situation, since the fortune teller knows about the impending clubbing, but is inherent with the viewers *observation* of the psychic “prediction”.

    On the other hand, the vast majority of the situations described in “Ironic” are not ironic at all, but simply tragic. I would not pick on Alanis Morissette for her linguistic ignorance, but she does deserve a certain amount of abuse for writing such moronic lyrics.

  12. CIDU Bill Oct 4th 2009 at 02:28 am 12

    That was my point, mkilby: the irony of everybody criticizing poor Alanis for not knowing what “irony” means, when so few of them seem to get it right themselves.

  13. Winter Wallaby Oct 4th 2009 at 04:26 am 13

    But Bill, it seems to me that Josh, Mike, and Norbert all do know what “irony” means, and have correctly explained how that word is appropriate in this comic.

  14. furrykef Oct 4th 2009 at 06:44 am 14

    I know what irony means too, but for some reason my comment about it is in the moderation queue.

  15. Powers Oct 4th 2009 at 08:26 am 15

    It’s possible that the real irony is unknown to us readers, as it’s only ironic if you know something about the man’s situation or the other parts of his fortune as told by the fortune teller.

    What would really be ironic is if the fortune teller was about to be clubbed and didn’t “see it coming.”

  16. Mitch4 Oct 4th 2009 at 10:20 am 16

    I’m somewhere in between Mark-in-Boston and the really hidebound language critics on how readily one accepts recent usage changes. The excellent “Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day” mailing from OUP has moved from just explaining acceptance or disapproval of a questioned form, to rating on a scale of five “stages”, from still an undisputed error up to almost universally accepted. (I’ll add a separate post on this.)

    That said, I think it’s clear that there have arisen in the last 20 to 30 years a handful of extended/modified senses of “irony” and “ironic”. And at least some of them are pretty obviously much more common among younger speakers and writers, who may not even recognize that their usage is less accepted by the establishment.

    At my work, we sometimes supervise University undergraduates who are helping out in various ways at nearby public schools. A couple years ago, at the start of a quarter, I arranged to meet one of these college students at an elementary school within walking distance, n the middle of an odd long block. We arrived at roughly the same time, from opposite directions. The following time, we had individually switched our directions. She remarked “Isn’t that ironic! Last time I came from the east and you from the west, and it was the opposite this time.” I had no idea at that moment how she could think that ironic. But lots of younger speakers and writers do use “ironic” for some variant of “coincidental” or “surprising” … and I don’t see much reason to dispute it.

    A different expanding usage of “ironic” is as a substitute for “sarcasm”. I really dislike sarcasm, and my negative reaction to this usage is not so much about language-change but almost ethical/moral — it’s like a coverup, if you’re doing something really nasty and ugly (i.e., being sarcastic) but explaining it away under a label of something more sophisticated and attractive (being ironic).

    Yet another one! — and this is not unknown to my generation, but the word “irony” wasn’t as tightly associated with it, as much as “pretend” or for some, “camp”. This is the matter of adopting some retro or otherwise apparently incongruous style of speech, dress, and carriage. Hey, I’m not simply wearing a bowling shirt, I’m wearing it ironically.

  17. Mitch4 Oct 4th 2009 at 10:23 am 17

    Here’s the explanation of the language-change scale, quoting from the Wed, 30 Sep 2009 mailing of “Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day”.

    Language-Change Index.

    The third edition of Garner’s Usage Tips of the Day, published by Oxford University Press in July, reflects several new practices. Invariably inferior forms, for example, are now marked with asterisks preceding the term or phrase, a marking common in linguistics.

    The most interesting new feature is the Language-Change Index. Its purpose is to measure how widely accepted various linguistic innovations have become. Such a measuring system for usage guides was first proposed by Louis G. Heller and James Macris in 1967. They noted that “usage specialists can make a clear-cut demarcation of phases in the evolutionary process relevant to the inception and development of alternative terms.”

    In these tips, the five stages are tagged as usages that are rejected (Stage 1), widely shunned (Stage 2), “widespread but . . .” (Stage 3), “ubiquitous but . . .” (Stage 4), or fully accepted (Stage 5). Here’s a more thorough explanation:

    Stage 1: A new form emerges as an innovation (or a dialectal form persists) among a small minority of the language community, perhaps displacing a traditional usage (e.g.: *”notary publics” for “notaries public”).

    Stage 2: The form spreads to a significant fraction of the language community but remains unacceptable in standard usage (e.g.: “nuclear” mispronounced /NOO-kyuh-luhr/.

    Stage 3: The form becomes commonplace even among many well-educated people but is still avoided in careful usage (e.g.: “octopi” used for “octopuses”).

    Stage 4: The form becomes virtually universal but is opposed on cogent grounds by a few linguistic stalwarts (die-hard snoots): (e.g.: “often” pronounced /OF-tuhn/).

    Stage 5: The form is universally accepted (not counting pseudo-snoot eccentrics) (e.g.: “possum” for “opossum”).

    —-

    Quotation of the Day: “In a sufficiently extended sense any prose statement could be called ambiguous.” William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity 19 (3d ed. 1961).

  18. mkilby Oct 4th 2009 at 05:29 pm 18

    The syntax and form of languages do evolve, no question about it. But that does not mean that ignorant usage should be automatically accepted as correct as soon as it achieves a sustainable minority of ignorant users. What I was attempting to say above was that Wiley got it right, so long as the reader is considered as part of the situation (of which Wiley was aware when he drew the cartoon).

    As far as the song goes, CIDU Bill is correct in saying that heaping abuse on the author is probably unfair, as the song merely parrots existing misuse. However, the lyrics themselves are still detestable (and not just because of the one word), and the “ironic” usage in the song remains incorrect.

  19. furrykef Oct 4th 2009 at 08:24 pm 19

    The syntax and form of languages do evolve, no question about it. But that does not mean that ignorant usage should be automatically accepted as correct as soon as it achieves a sustainable minority of ignorant users.

    The problem here is that the misuse of “ironic” is probably much more common than the correct use of it, so it’s not a “sustainable minority” but actually a majority. In fact, almost any sentence beginning with “Ironically…” is almost guaranteed not to be ironic.

    Don’t believe me? Check out this list, which appears to be a genuine, unbiased list of quotations containing “ironically”, both correctly and incorrectly.

    - Kef

  20. furrykef Oct 4th 2009 at 08:25 pm 20

    Hmm. That list is shorter than I thought it was. Well, googling will yield similar results, of course.

  21. buzz Oct 4th 2009 at 11:06 pm 21

    I agree with Mike: The irony is that if he didn’t want to know what his future was, he wouldn’t be in the fortune teller’s parlor where her accomplice was going to kill him.

  22. Mitch4 Oct 4th 2009 at 11:39 pm 22

    I hope that the “language-change scale” is not taken as just more pounding on the ultra-liberal side of accepting any and all change as just what happens. On the contrary, it is meant to suggest the gradations on how fully some changed usage has taken hold.

    If it’s one not to your taste, the apparent stage of adoption makes a difference in what you want to say in opposition. If it’s still early in the game, you can just say this is correct and that is incorrect. Later on you may feel more obliged to set out the “cogent grounds” for your opposition.

    Also of course, the degree of adoption may speak to your chances of stemming the tide. There are so many people and websites and print sources ready to snap photos and ridicule “Grocers’ Apostrophe” signs that it may be held back altogether.

    I suspect we all (including me) may be fooling ourselves a little, if we imagine the situation with “ironic” and “ironically” was clear and simple some while ago, say 50 years. It has long been somewhat vexed — witness Josh at #2 needing to distinguish “dramatic irony”. Or check out “A Rhetoric of Irony” http://www.amazon.com/Rhetoric-Irony-Phoenix-Books/dp/0226065537 by the late great Wayne C. Booth. As the publisher’s blurb on the Amazon page puts it,

    Perhaps no other critical label has been made to cover more ground than “irony,” and in our time irony has come to have so many meanings that by itself it means almost nothing. In this work, Wayne C. Booth cuts through the resulting confusions by analyzing how we manage to share quite specific ironies—and why we often fail when we try to do so.

    As I said before, I’m sometimes bewildered by (usually young) people saying “ironic” for a situation or event that is either simply coincidental or maybe not even notable at all. But I don’t think I have cogent grounds for calling that “ignorant” usage. Ignorant of what? Of my incomprehension? Well, maybe.

    OTOH I’m unabashed about condemning “ironic” as a cover for “sarcastic”. But I would charge those abusers not exactly as ignorant but as evil!

  23. Powers Oct 5th 2009 at 07:49 am 23

    furrykef: On that list you posted, here’s how I tabulate the results:

    Unable to tell whether “ironically” is used correctly (due to lack of context): De Palma, Arkin, Downes, Boone, Buckingham, Cellucci, Morris, Friel. (8)

    “ironically” used to mean “coincidentally”: Mitchell. (1)

    “ironically” used to mean “seemingly contradictorily”: Jenkins, Heilbrun, Freud. (3)

    “ironically” used to mean “contrary to expectations”: Lewinsky, Bloomberg, Johnson, Puig, Hoffman, Guillaume, Young, Walsch. (8)

    That’s not too bad.

  24. Rammy M Oct 5th 2009 at 11:06 am 24

    @ cidu Bill (#3)

    >If … meant simply … then we wouldn’t have a separate word for it.

    You know that’s not true. Some examples would include words from separate sources (languages), and words that used to have some difference in meaning, but have converged.

  25. Less reality, more fantasy, no baby blues Oct 5th 2009 at 12:03 pm 25

    This might be considered dramatic irony: The Gypsy tells the man that he will unexpectedly die, and he, either, assumes that she is being vague in order to manipulate him, or that this will happen in the future. Readers, however, see that he about to be fucked.

    Irony (noun): 1. Unexpected occurences or the incongruity of those occurences.
    2. Using words in nonliteral manners, or to express the opposite of the apparent meaning of one’s statement.
    3. Sardonic speech or writing.
    4. Dramatic irony: Presenting information to the audience that is not known to the characters.
    5. Socratic irony: Listening and saying nothing while someone gives an inaccurate argument, then, disproving the information presented in that argument in order to humiliate him.

  26. Adam! Oct 5th 2009 at 10:58 pm 26

    “Unrony” is a great term for examples of “irony” that are not quite ironic.

    Unronically, people who complain that “irony” has lost its meaning are frequently ignorant of its original meaning, which has essentially been reassigned to the word sarcasm. From Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum (1708):

    “Irony, a Figure us’d by Oratours, when they fpeak contrary to what they mean, for as to make a fhew of praifing an Adverfary, and at the fame time to fcoff at and defpife him.”

    Interestingly, at the time “sarcasm” had no ironic component.
    “Sarcafm, a biting or nipping Jeft ; a bitter Scoff or Taunt : Alfo a Rhetorical Figure in which fuch Scoffs are us’d.”

    It’s interesting that these words have done a definitional cakewalk.

  27. furrykef Oct 6th 2009 at 12:32 am 27

    Adam! — I don’t know whether you were joking or not, but those aren’t actually f’s. The symbol is actually ſ and is just the way the lowercase letter ’s’ was written when it wasn’t the last letter of a word. So it says “Sarcaſm”, not “Sarcafm”.

    - Kef

  28. Adam! Oct 6th 2009 at 03:25 am 28

    surrykef — And I cannot tell if you are joking or not; on good faith I will assume you are.

    Tangentially: More than just at the end of a word, the long ess was also not to be used before kays and bees, before a contraction, or adjacent to an eff. And of course never in a capitalized word.

  29. Mark in Boston Oct 6th 2009 at 12:56 pm 29

    From Dr. Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary (1755):

    IRONY. noun substantive. A mode of speech in which the meaning is contrary to the words: as, “Bolingbroke was a holy man.”

  30. Todd Oct 10th 2009 at 02:55 pm 30

    I don’t think the tobacco exec dying of a smoking disease is ironic; it’s quite appropriate. Now the surgeon general dying of a smoking disease would be ironic.

    About the comic: We don’t know that the fortune teller is working with the attacker, but we can deduce that she’s just told him he’s going to get hit with a club. To my knowledge, ironic is used correctly in this comic.

  31. Todd Oct 10th 2009 at 03:21 pm 31

    What’s more ironic than Alanis playing God (in Kevin Smith’s Dogma)?

  32. Lihtox Oct 10th 2009 at 08:03 pm 32

    The problem is that there doesn’t seem to be a word that means “amusingly, pointedly, or unexpectedly appropriate”, so “ironic” has been filling that niche. For example, consider the urban legend of a drive-in theater that was showing the movie Twister when it was destroyed by a tornado. What is the word for something like that? Appropriate doesn’t fit, and coincidental doesn’t seem strong enough to me. Adding an adjective like “eerily” to either might do the trick, but it would be much better to have a single word for it. Perhaps we can import something from French or another language?

    That said, I myself am careful to use ironic only to mean “the opposite of what one might expect”, and whenever I hear the word used I stop and think about whether the situation really is, in fact, ironic.

  33. Lola Oct 10th 2009 at 09:56 pm 33

    apt

  34. Mitch4 Oct 10th 2009 at 10:54 pm 34

    and “fitting”

  35. Mitch4 Oct 12th 2009 at 06:59 pm 35

    A couple more recent appearances of “irony” / “ironic” / “ironically”.
    What’s your take as to whether these are correct/traditional/familiar uses of those words?

    1) Zits today (2009-10-12)
    http://cserver.king-online.com/content/Zits?date=2009-10-12&referer=http://www.dailyink.com&size=large
    “Jeremy, you’re wearing my old vest to school!”
    “It’s ironic dress day. [next panel] We’re supposed to wear something that we would never be caught dead wearing.”

    2) Rubes yesterday
    http://comics.com/rubes/2009-10-11/
    Chicken speaking at a funeral, picture of smiling egg propped up on coffin.
    “Humpty was a good egg who always looked at life on the sunnyside, which ironically is exactly where he ended up.”

    —-

    My takes:

    1) Is increasingly popular recently, but entirely in accord with some traditional (”correct”) usage. [I do have some objections to this approach to life, but not as a matter of putative word misuse.]

    2) This is a bit off from the central meaning of the traditional usage patterns. I won’t quite call it wrong, but there would surely be better ways of putting it.

  36. Mitch4 Oct 13th 2009 at 03:45 am 36

    Another one …

    Loose Parts
    http://imgsrv.gocomics.com/dim/?fh=a1f95a1056dba1f4bfb5d2701b7dfc41&w=450.0
    or
    http://www.gocomics.com/looseparts/2009/10/12/

    People chatting at a party.
    Caption: “It’s a cause fraught with irony.”
    T-shirt reads: “SAVE THE PLAIN WHITE T-SHIRT”

    —

    My take: not terribly funny, but the use of “irony” is entirely “correct” and traditional.

  37. Mitch4 Oct 13th 2009 at 04:36 am 37

    Here’s one with a direct discussion of the language question!
    (And brings up “kitsch”.)

    Rabbits Against Magic for Monday 2009-10-12
    http://www.gocomics.com/rabbitsagainstmagic/2009/10/12/

    Panel 1-
    Eightball: Look! I got a boxing nun hand puppet.
    Weenus: *Sigh*. More ironic kitsch for our disposable culture to consume.
    Panel 2 -
    Eightball: What’s ironic about it?
    Weenus: Because nuns are the least likely people you’d expect to see boxing.
    Panel 3 -
    Weenus is nocked out on the floor, the nun toy has her boxing glove extended
    Eightball: sister Knuckles doesn’t read the memos.

    My take:
    His original use of “ironic” was okay, plugging into the recently popular sense of
    “disavowing one’s guilty pleasures or signs of half-serious half-unserious style choice”.
    [Though I’m probably overstating how far the half-serious side is acknowledged … when
    someone protests “I was being ironic!” they want to claim “I don’t really like that stuff at
    all!”]
    But then the explicit “least likely” explanation is quite off-target, I think.

  38. Mitch4 Oct 18th 2009 at 09:32 am 38

    2009/10/18

    Pros & Cons for Sunday 2009/10/18

    http://cserver.king-online.com/content/Lawyer?date=2009-10-18&referer=http://www.dailyink.com

    Judge: You shall go to the State Penitentiary for five years.
    [Second panel]
    Defendant: If I had been given a fraction of the money spent on solving my crime, tracking me down, arresting, interrogating and charging me, putting me on trial in front of a jury of my peers, finding me guilty and sending me to prison for five years …
    [Third panel]
    Defendant continues: I’d ever have broken the law in the first place.
    Judge: Ironic, isn’t it?

    ——

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