Wednesday, February 04, 2009

Irony?

The Times of India :

"In a string of tragedies where ironically those hailing from AP met a violent end in the US in the last 15 months, software engineer N Akshay Vishal working with fraud-hit Satyam Computers was shot dead by unidentified assailants in Arkansas on January 13 last."

I don't understand. What's the irony here? Do you ever get the feeling nowadays that people are using "irony" for just about anything they can't remember the correct word for?

7 comments:

sherene said...

Ironical though this may be, I've noticed the same lately.

Anonymous said...

isn't that just ironical?

Anonymous said...

what are you doing reading the times of india?

Anonymous said...

I've felt the same way about that Alanis song. What exactly was ironic again?

gawker said...

sherene, rukmani : Thank you for adding two more uses for the word.

anon : It was posted in some immigration forum. otherwise i usually don't surf the TOI.

madhav : Yes Alanis was a trailblazing pioneer in the movement to systematically abuse the word.

Anonymous said...

It's not just 'ironic' ... people nowadays use big words incorrectly in their articles fairly frequently. People seem to rely more on a thesaurus rather than extensive reading, to get an idea of the right word to use. Glad to see you writing again, btw.
-MK

gawker said...

MK : I feel the exact same way. After many years of analysis, I have concluded that long words only create the illusion of interesting writing. And often, the illusion only exists in the writer's head.