That’s ironic. It would also be ironic for someone who was already a billionaire to win the lottery.
The black fly contrasts with the white wine. So what? Not ironic. It would be ironic if the holder of the Chardonnay had just told the old joke where the man complains to the waiter about a fly in his soup, and the waiter says “Be quiet, or everybody will want one!”
Prisoner dies because his pardon is just too late? Not ironic, just sad. It would be ironic if a man carrying the governors orders about the pardon to the prison governor was delayed three minutes by a chaotic protest outside the prison opposing capital punishment.
Rain on your wedding day? Not ironic, just disappointing. It might be ironic if the bride and groom were both meteorologists.
A free ride when you’ve already paid? I suppose getting a freebie for something that you’ve pre-paid is mildly ironic, but it’s a pretty weak example.
Not taking somebody’s good advice? Not ironic, just dumb.
Possibly her best example of irony.
Not ironic X 2.
Ironic, and nice imagery. Bombarded with preposterous amounts of similar item B when you actually need A.
Possibly the best (or worst, depending upon your viewpoint) example of a misuse of irony is of course Alanis Morrisette’s song Ironic. The only thing ironic about the entire song, is that almost nothing in it is ironic.
The meaning of irony that Alanis is trying (and failing) to describe involves being “mocked by fate”, in a manner that somehow turns things on their head.
The other meaning for irony is that it’s a synonym for sarcasm, where the intended meaning is the opposite of the literal meaning. That sense is easier.
(Also dramatic irony, of course, but that’s a straightforward definition.)
I’m not sure that “paradox” is misused or misunderstood to the same extent as irony, is it? It has a strict technical definition as a logical paradox, but also a looser colloquial meaning where things are just contrary to the expected order.
If you’re referring to an obstetrician and a pediatrician as a paradox, you’re getting it wrong. If you also lack carbon in your steel sculpture, it’s irony.
How about Yogi Berra’s famed assertion “Nobody goes to that restaurant, it’s always too crowded”?
Sometimes a paradox (like an oxymoron) expresses a well-understood truth, even if it seems contradictory. Like Jesus saying, “He who loses his life will save it.”
Ooh! The Epimenides paradox! “Epimenides the Cretan says all Cretans are liars.” Which looks like a real paradox — you know, like “This Sentence Is A Lie,” where if it’s true it’d be false; but if it’s false, it’d be true — only it’s not actually a problem.
Even within formal terms, what qualifies as a “paradox” is sometimes disputed. Take the so-called Unexpected Hanging/Test Paradox.
For many, including myself, it is not a paradox at all.* It languished as uninteresting until someone (can’t find the cite) wrote an article claiming it was a paradox, restarting the debate.
To me, it’s a misuse of the term. There’s nothing paradoxical about it. It’s just something that’s surprising at first glance.
It’s not a paradox, it’s merely a statement of fact. Given two perfectly logical people (effectively automatons) with the same skills and information, one cannot make a choice that the other cannot predict. Throw in some irrational behavior (being human) and it’s a very different situation.
I had once been in a mild disagreement with a Syracuse U prof who knows much more about mathematics and formal logic than I do.
He reserved “paradox” in math/logic to unanswered condundrums. I had been inclined to use a secondary meaning for apparent mind benders which have been resolved, and in some cases are relatively trivial in resolution.
I vaguely recall that he soon understood my approach to more than one meaning.
(Disclaimer: No, I didn’t just make that joke up. I used it in the above-linked thread, and I got the idea because I had seen it in some even earlier thread.)
The lottery thing is definitely not ironic and still wouldn’t be if it was a billionaire, neither is the “afraid to fly” guy. The only actual irony is the spoons thing.
Although if the billionaire had walked out on a meeting that could’ve earned him $2 million just to buy a ticket that then comes in for $1 million, that would be irony.
It’s really just saying “Based on what we know, we’d expect to see X. But we don’t see X. Why?”, which is not really a paradox.
The label though, leads to many discussions (e.g. on this site) predicated on the assumption that all one needs to do is think of a plausible, self-consistent reason why we haven’t detected alien life, and one has “solved” the paradox.
When in fact of course there are many, somewhat plausible, proposed reasons we haven’t seen ETI. We just don’t know which, if any, of these hypotheses is the true reason.
A paradox has to be self-contradictory (at least as expressed) but true (at least in some sense).
“The only thing you can be certain of is that certainty is an impossibility”.
Gödel’s incompleness theorem is a formal treatise pointing out a paradox: that any sufficiently complicated mathematical system that is set up to make a formal recipe for determining what mathematical expressions are true will inevitably set the stage for true expressions consistent with that sytem whose truth cannot be assessed by that system. (Therefore an absolute system of this nature is inherently impossible).