Ironic.
(Originally published, or rather Poasted, in another place, May 7, 2026.)
Umberto Eco speaks of a descriptive semantics and syntactics but a more ambiguous or dialectical descriptive-prescriptive pragmatics, and extols this as part of "a return to the very roots of the philosophy of language" (The Limits of Interpretation, p. 213). In that spirit, let's talk about the Alanis Morissette song "Ironic," which has been a subject of philological interest for almost my entire conscious life. (I have two memories that I think might predate Jagged Little Pill's release.) The song describes a number of vaguely, or more than vaguely, disappointing or frustrating situations, all of which it wants the listener to believe are ironic--yet only a few of them seem to fit the conventional definitions of irony used by humorists, dramatists, and so on.
Description and Anti-prescription
Much of Umberto Eco’s book The Limits of Interpretation is preoccupied with the idea of “correct” and “incorrect” readings of texts. The various essays of his of which the book is a recension focus chiefly on this subject as well. As the title implies, Eco insists that, while there is no such thing as an obvious right reading, or interpretation, of a text, there may be any number of obvious wrong ones. This is an unfashionable idea in many circles and is possibly even more unfashionable when extended to all linguistic acts. I believe that we should, nevertheless, extend it to all linguistic acts, and not only to interpretation, but to use, mention, and citation as well. Here I will be using Eco’s book as a vade-mecum for my assessment of broader issues in the way we now understand language.
Polemic on the Rectification of Names
It is said that when Confucius was asked what he would do if he were appointed a governor, he said that he would “rectify the names” to make words correspond to reality. This (to English-speaking ears) unusual expression, written 正名 and pronounced zhèngmìng in Chinese and seimei in Japanese, is important in Confucianism and other East Asian philosophy and provides for some interesting harmonies and counterpoints with concepts in Western thought as well, such as direction of fit and disputes concerning linguistic prescriptivism. Unfortunately, the main setting in which one sees the term employed in non-specialist English is the so-called “intellectual dark web” and related far-right online environments—a milieu in which “rectification of names” is used both insufficiently and inaccurately.
Affronts to English Usage
This list is to be thought of in the context of Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow Book (枕草子Makura no sōshi). Umberto Eco’s The Infinity of Lists (La vertigine della lista) and Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins” (“El idioma analítico de John Wilkins”) might also guide some readers to an understanding that this isn’t to be taken too literally, and yet, at the same time, is to be taken utterly seriously.