It's not like rain on your wedding day

In an issue of Wired magazine from August that I was reading a couple weeks ago I spotted a sidebar on a guy who made Excel-style charts (pie and graph) of pop culture items on a site called graphjam.com. My personal favorite featured in the piece was this one:



Events described in the Alanis Morisette song that are...
Ironic = 0%
Unfortunate circumstance = 100%

That came to mind a few days later when my fiancée and I were shopping in a chain store whose name features the object on which one sleeps, the object in which one performs personal cleaning, and an alliterative term suggesting it carries more than merchandise for just those two areas of the house.

Whether it should have come to mind is another story.

While searching for generic gifts in a given price range we paused in an area of the store where items geared toward relaxation were found: vibrating neck massagers, comfy slippers, incense holders, etc. Perhaps the most notable display was an endcap that played selections from compact discs available for sale its shelves, featuring titles like "Music for Quiet Times" and "Rainforest Sounds" and the like. The sign called it the "Rejuvenation Station".

Located directly above this portion of the store, up in the exposed ceiling, rattled an industrial-size air conditioning unit, the noise of which drowned out the ostensibly soothing sounds from the CD display, even when standing directly in front of it.

Noticing this disparity between the intention of the products in that part of the store and the utter annihilation of their effect by the large metal object above them, I pondered whether this arrangement was genuinely ironic. Likely Alanis would consider it so, but as already deftly identified in the aforementioned chart from the article, that didn't necessarily prove anything. "Irony" had been so misappropriated in our society that even having studied the concept in college I was no longer able to be absolutely certain any more. It wasn't anything simple like verbal irony (e.g., sarcasm), and there was no audience with knowledge a character lacked to qualify as dramatic irony, but whether it could be construed as irony of situation—I remained somewhat flummoxed. Obviously it was poor design on the part of the party (or parties) involved in arranging the store, but was it anything more than that?

After completing our shopping there and hitting a few more stores in the mall we went to a restaurant for lunch. While in there my fiancée looked up "irony" on her Blackberry device, but even after reviewing a proper definition I couldn't shake the notion that there could be the possibility of it going either way.

What was most confounding was that I could even be confounded. This was the inevitable consequence of a society where words get twisted to suggest whatever the speaker or writer (or singer) intends, whether those words actually mean what is intended or not: It's not merely that those who never knew in the first place go around misusing the terms, but those who at least more or less had some grasp on the meaning start to lose that.

Minutes later—and I am not making this up—over the speakers in the ceiling of the restaurant started playing the aforementioned Alanis Morissette track.

That much I know is coincidence; with that there is no trace of irony.

There must be a chart proving it somewhere…

~

I'm pretty sure the thing in the store with the relaxation products under the noisy unit is not irony either.

~

Also not irony: During that same shopping trip, we popped in to the Apple store for some iTunes gift cards for stocking stuffers. As anyone who has been in that store knows, there are no cash registers. Associates carry wireless devices that allow them to ring up purchases from anywhere in the store. It's very high tech, as one would expect from that company.

When we went to pay for our purchase with a credit card, the associate's wireless device wouldn't read it. So she had to break out that sliding device and three-part carbon paper sales slips that stopped being prevalent at least 15 years ago.

Not ironic. Funny, but not ironic.