After an articulate twitter post by @dooce about irony, I came to the realization that hipsters have a fundamental commonality with Alanis Morrissette. They both misuse the word irony, a lot.
However, Alanis was much more consistent with her misuses. She tended to use the word as though it meant 'bad luck' or 'wow, that sucks'. Rain on your wedding day? Meeting the man of your dreams, and then meeting his beautiful wife? No smoking sign on your cigarette break? Those are all examples of shitty circumstances, none of which being ironic in the least.
Hipsters on the other hand seem to misuse it in all sorts of versatile ways. They use it similarly to how they used 'random' (which was also massively misused, by the way). They use it to denote the weird, strange or bizarre. They use it to describe any piece of art whatsoever regardless of what it is. The word has almost taken on the versatility of a swear word, meaning nothing and everything all at once.
As academically fascinating as this usage may be for all the linguists and social scientists out there, it's very frustrating that when it took me so long to figure out exactly what irony was (Alanis totally screwed me up here), it matters not that I now know the proper meaning and have the ability to use it appropriately in conversation. No one can recognize that I know my stuff. Because no one else knows it.
Irony has a very specific meaning. It is when the literal meaning is opposite to the underlying meaning. Sarcasm is a good example. A sort of sub-type of irony is when the opposite of what you'd expect to happen happens, but that's a tricky definition that is typically referring to dramatic irony which implies an audience. Though, if people keep misusing irony like they do...it might as well become meaningless and be stricken from the English language.
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