Perhaps Rain on Your Wedding Day Really Is Ironic?

Over the years, Alanis Morissette's 1995 song "Ironic" has taken a lot of flack for not actually being ironic, e.g. the line "It's like rain on your wedding day" is merely inconvenient, not actually ironic per se, goes the argument. The running joke has become that "Ironic," by not actually being ironic, is itself an act of irony.

While no great Alanis fan myself, I can't help but note the word ironic is itself difficult to pin down; the on-line dictionary merely lists ironic's definition as:

1. Characterized by or constituting irony.

2. Given to the use of irony. See Synonyms at sarcastic.

3. Poignantly contrary to what was expected or intended

Needless to say, the first definition is purely tautological, the second only gives a synonym (which starts the referential cycle all over), and the third is broad and vague, inclusive of all forms of disappointment and contradiction.

So, really, if you were expecting sunshine and rainbows and puppies on your wedding day, naive as that may be, might rain coming instead be a precisely-inverted violation of your expectations, and hence sincerely qualify as ironic?

Also, I think if you paid for a ride but then found out that it was free all along, you would indeed relate the story to your friends later as an ironic incident.

And if you were to have a thousand spoons, but really only needed one knife (presumably to cut a box open or something, for which your curious over-abundance of spoons would be unhelpful), you might indeed sigh bemusedly and mutter, "ah, the irony!"

I'm not saying these are all clear-cut examples of irony; for example, meeting the man of your dreams and then meeting his beautiful wife, while certainly frustrating, perhaps even tragic, I'm not sure can quite be stretched to qualify as "ironic." But that's just the thing--what does qualify as ironic? How do you define it? If you can't precisely explicate its meaning, then perhaps you are unqualified to determine when a song is ironic and when it is not.

All I'm saying is that perhaps Alanis Morissette has the last laugh; the irony isn't that the song is unironic, the irony is that it is ironic, and we've been misunderstanding it all along.