What is Ironic?

This is Alanis Morissette.

And in 1995, she wrote a song called 'Ironic'

The word ‘ironic’ means something has happened in the exact opposite way than what is expected. Things that are ironic are, say, a fire station being burnt to the ground, or a Nazi war criminal discovering the joys of kosher food, or Simon Cowell financing an experimental music project with Patti Smith. These things are ironic because it’s the opposite of what you would expect, this is not the same thing as when something happens that is just inconvenient or crappy.

This is different to when something happens that sucks a bit. Take, for example, every single line of Alanis Morissette’s 1995 song, ‘Ironic’.

Morissette sings that irony is ‘like rain on your wedding day’ or ‘it’s a free ride, once you’ve already paid’ or ‘it’s the good advice that you just didn’t take’ These things are not in any way ironic – they just suck, or were caused by the individual’s own stupidity.

The Jon Stewart Show once aired a clip of George Bush from back in 2000, having a discussion with a woman about baloney sandwiches. For some reason that isn’t entirely clear, they are talking about the fact that Bush says he eats baloney sandwiches everyday. When the woman asks him ‘don’t you find that ironic? Bush guffaws, then responds to the woman ‘I find you ironic!’ then smirks at his own joke and shoves the rest of the baloney sandwich that he was eating at the time into his mouth.

Clearly from this comment, we see that George Bush thinks that the word ‘ironic’ is a sort of insult, to be used along the same lines of ‘you suck!’ or ‘your mother!’.

The same goes for the use of the word ‘literally.’ The definition of ‘literally’ is when something actually happened. For example, you can’t say ‘I literally fell of my chair laughing’, unless you actually did do this. You can’t say ‘I’m literally roasting’ to describe heat exhaustion, unless you are being attacked with a flame-thrower. You can’t say ‘I was literally crawling up the walls’ unless you are actually Spiderman.

A great example of this kind of language misuse is the manufacturer of a toy called ‘Timmy the Energy Bear’ which comes with the description ‘Timmy is a delightful cuddly, soft toy who is literally alive!’

On the up-side, these kind of slip-ups can be funny, and good for a lol or two. The only time it starts to get uncomfortable is when that particular person happened to be the leader of western world for eight years.

Holy Shit: When a sentence doesn't need to start with a capital

Throughout history, many famous artists have painted over their previous work to make a whole new painting. This makes sense, since canvases were, and are still, pretty expensive, and as MC Grammar knows all too well, sometimes you'll be working day and night on a piece of art – in my case, this voluminous blog – and it will be only halfway through that you'll realise that what you're doing is shit.

For example, this is a very beautiful portrait painted Frida Kahlo in the 1930s.

 But what most people don't know is that X-ray images have shown that Kahlo was originally painting this:

Which IS good, but I'm sure you'll agree, isn't as good as what she ended up with. And the painting by Botticelli, which is generally known to look like this:

Is in fact painted over an earlier draft that looks like this:

And just like these examples, it has been recently discovered that a lost Leonardo da Vinci painting has been hiding behind a fresco at Florence’s town hall.

The painting, which is titled ‘The Battle of Anghiari’, is believed to have been hidden for the last five centuries. In 1504, da Vinci worked in the Hall of Five Hundred in the Palazzo Vecchio and managed to complete only the centrepiece of his work. After 1555, the palace room undertook renovations, and the painting was covered by other stuff, which we now realise is a piece of total crap.

Here's a bit of the uncovered painting:

Anyway, here's where shit gets seriously crazy. When Leonardo da Vinci makes it to the papers. When you start a sentence with 'da Vinci', you don't have to start the sentence with a capital letter. Here's an example.

In this case, because 'da Vinci' is a surname that starts with a lower case letter, not an uppercase letter. You can't just make it an uppercase letter because you're starting a new sentence - in this case the fact that da Vinci's name starts with a lowercase letter overrides the fact that sentences are meant to start with an uppercase letter.

I'm sure that I don't have to tell you that this is some crazy shit. But don't be too frightened by this, just let this fact wash over you like a big wave. After all, da Vinci created some pretty dope stuff, like this business: