Struggling to understand the difference between irony and unfortunate events. My partner is quite smart and I don’t want to make a fool of myself.
EDIT – Thanks everyone, your responses have really helped. Hopefully I’ll be less likely to make a fool of myself describing something as ironic, in the future.
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Follow-up question: does irony always have to be contrapuntal—i.e., the collision of two opposite or unexpected things? Or can extreme parallelism also be ironic?
For example, let’s say a guy named Jerry Atrick writes the definitive book on Gen Z culture. Obviously that would be ironic.
But wouldn’t it also be ironic if Jerry wrote the definitive book on aging?
Like, if you saw a book in the book store called, “Making the Most of Your Retirement” by Jerry Atrick, wouldn’t you laugh and say, “Wow, that’s ironic”?
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