How Ironic, or Paradoxical, or Something

How Ironic, or Paradoxical, or Something



The Difference between Irony and Paradox

Do you think it’s ironic that people use the word ironic to describe situations that are anything but ironic? Let’s investigate. Have you ever heard someone pose a rhetorical question along these lines -

“Isn’t it ironic that the bill collector burst into the lobby at the very moment I was sneaking out my office window?”

To really answer this question, we need to know what irony means. Irony is an incongruity between what one expects and what occurs. We can assume our hypothetical deadbeat business person is aware that his creditors will come after him. Therefore, the fact that one showed up while he was trying to skip town would not be unexpected. Rather than ironic, the incident was merely coincidental.

Usage rule – 87% of the time, substituting the word coincidental for ironic will make your sentence sensible.

Here’s a sentence where irony is used correctly.

“It’s ironic that the customer rejected my proposal for the very reason I expected him to accept it.”

No coincidence here. We can see that coincidence and irony are, if anything, opposites. Be careful.

OK, now that we’ve cleared that up, what about the difference between irony and paradox?

A paradox is a self-contradictory assertion -

“I am the most modest person in the world.”

“I always lie.”

“Never say never.”

G K Chesterton

G K Chesterton

A paradox can also be a statement that appears to be self-contradictory, but may be true. One of my favorite authors, G.K. Chesterton, was known as the Prince of Paradox. Here are a couple examples of how he used paradox to suggest deep truths, pulled from this fascinating list of famous paradoxical quotations.

“Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason.”

“The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it.”

I suppose it would be fair to say that any paradox is ironic, in the sense that it is unexpected. But certainly, all irony is not paradox. In the earlier example, the sales rep lost an order for an unexpected reason, but the outcome was not necessarily contradictory – we don’t know enough about what happened to make that determination.

Paradox requires investigation. If the statement contains truth or is false but based on logical premises, it is a paradox. If neither applies, it is just silly. Irony, in contrast, is not so much concerned with underlying truth as it is in observing conditions or situations that are contradictory on their surface.

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