Writing for Fun - Irony 1

From Kerry Patterson at www.vitalsmarts.com

People are constantly misusing the word irony. That's right, grab your pitchforks, hot tar, and feathers and come join with me as I lead a counterassault on this growing threat.

This problem, as you may know, falls in the middle of an ugly onslaught of morphing words and degrading grammar—all of which are chipping away at the clarity of our communication. For example, teenagers in my neighborhood now use the word heinous (which means totally reprehensible, even abominable) to mean "out of fashion" or possibly "uncool." For example, I recently overheard the following sentence. "She carried a purse that was positively heinous."
Now, unless said purse was actually seen wielding a chain saw in a school bus, it probably wasn't one tiny bit heinous.

Some words have actually come to mean their exact opposite. People now use literally to mean "not literally." Once again, overheard in a shopping mall: "I ate so much at the buffet that I was literally two potato chips away from exploding." I doubt it.

The term ironic, which is rich in meaning and nuance, is routinely used to mean weird or paradoxical and that's a bit of a shame because the word means so much more. If you look irony up in the dictionary, you don't get much help. The most common meaning is: "surprising or unexpected," but that's much too broad an explanation.

"How's your dad?"
"Didn't you hear? He was hit by a truck and killed!"
"Really? How ironic."

Of course, none of this verbal confusion is of much import. These examples are not nearly as bad as the fact that flammable and inflammable both mean "flammable." Now there's a verbal mix-up of some potential consequence. Notwithstanding the triviality of the issue, I recently came up with such a wonderful tool for explaining the meaning of the word irony that I just have to tell the story.

It all started sixteen years ago when my wife and I bought the home we currently live in. The backyard of our new house consisted of a long, sloping stretch of lawn that was just terrific if you were a six-year-old who enjoyed rolling down the hill. My wife and I had other plans in mind, so we re-landscaped our entire yard. This included planting over two hundred trees and shrubs. As we chose between oak, red oak, flaming red oak, etc., I eventually became quite familiar with the names of all of our choices.

Unfortunately, as I continued my headlong plunge into senility, it wasn't long until I had forgotten the name of almost every choice of foliage. I didn't care a whit about this mental slippage until I discovered that people would look at our yard, like a particular tree or shrub, and then ask me for the name.