I’ve always avoided using the word ‘ironic’ because I’m worried about using it incorrectly. I was listening to ‘Ironic’ by Alanis Morrisette and remembered she had been called out for not understanding what ironic meant. I find most explanations to be confusing and so I figured I’d ask here.
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Something is ironic when it is not just unexpected, but specifically and amusingly contrary to what is expected. Not just “I didn’t expect that” but “I expected precisely the opposite of that and it happened anyway, despite actions taken to prevent it and probably *because* of those actions.”
For a *wrong* example, when Alanis Morrisette sings about rain on a wedding day – there is no particular reason to believe that it should or should not rain on any given day. Even if the forecast does not show rain, it would not be unexpected *per se* that the forecast is wrong since this happens fairly regularly. The fact that it’s your wedding day does not make rain unlikely, just unwanted. As Bender puts it, [that’s not ironic, it’s just coincidental](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1T0aJnJU7-c).
An example of irony on your wedding day would be if you planned an indoor ceremony specifically because you did not want to take the chance for rain, and then a pipe burst in the ceiling and “rained” water down on your ceremony even though it was sunny and not raining outside. This would be ironic because you expected it to possibly rain *outside* and planned to avoid it by being inside where rain can’t happen, but something unexpected happened that caused it to “rain” anyway while it would have been better to hold the ceremony outside in the first place. Not only that, but your own actions to avoid the rain *caused* you to experience “rain” on your wedding day.
Similarly, while a plane crash is always unexpected, it isn’t unexpected that it would happen specifically when one passenger happens to be flying for the first time and is afraid to fly. Quite the opposite – he *definitely* expected it, since he’s been afraid to fly his whole damn life. The plane crash was unexpected and him flying was unexpected, and they just happened to coincide on the same flight.
A tragic example of real life irony is the crashes of the Boeing 737-MAX8 due to a feature that was added specifically to prevent the planes from stalling and therefore crashing – it was added to prevent the plane nose from rising up due to the unconventional configuration of the engines. Instead, a faulty sensor caused the plane to believe it was about to stall so the safety feature directed the nose *down* when it shouldn’t have, causing the planes to plummet directly into the ground. It’s unexpected that a feature specifically added to improve the safety of the aircraft was the very thing that made the planes unsafe.
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