The battle over equating irony and coincidence has been raging for some time. The first edition of “Fowler’s Modern English Usage” (1926) claims that “a protest is needed against the application … of ‘irony’ … to every trivial oddity.” Seventy years later, the third edition admitted that “this weakened use looks as if it has come to stay,” and the fourth edition, published in 2015, refers darkly to “vague, watered down newer meanings” of irony.

What Irony Is Not The American Heritage Dictionary provides a usage note for “ironic” that addresses this distinction: “Sometimes, people misapply ironic, irony, and ironically to events and circumstances that might better be described as simply coincidentalor improbable, with no particular lessons about human vanity or presumption.

It is also a concept that is notoriously difficult to define. Much like Winona Ryder’s character in the 1994 rom-com “Reality Bites,” whose inability to describe irony costs her a job interview, we know it when we see it, but nonetheless have trouble articulating it.

[https://relevant.community/culture/post/5f2ddbb112c1bb0017d95567](https://relevant.community/culture/post/5f2ddbb112c1bb0017d95567)

Both situational irony and coincidence are used to refer to states of affairs that may be difficult to classify as clearly belonging to one concept or the other. And attempts to cleanly differentiate between them may be a fool’s errand. The most we can say is that some people care about the distinction a great deal, and it is worth asking oneself, before describing such occurrences, whether a juxtaposition is mundane (that is, coincidental) or more surprising, consequential, or significant — and therefore ironic.