You Look Familiar...

 Woman Who Looks Like Casey Anthony, Sammy Blackwell, Attacked By Driver In Oklahoma

A woman outraged over the Casey Anthony verdict was arrested in Oklahoma for allegedly attacking a convenience store clerk who resembles the Florida mom acquitted of murdering her daughter. 

After leaving work in Chouteau on Friday, Sammay Blackwell said a customer who had told her that "you look like Casey Anthony" followed her for several miles and then crashed her car into Blackwell's, causing her to flip several times...

Sure it sounds insane, but I must confess that there is a clerk in my local liquor store who bears an uncanny resemblance to insufferable Euro-twit Piers Morgan, and I consequently find myself suppressing the urge to slap his smug puss as he bags my moderately-priced Shiraz. So I can relate.

The nit I'm picking with this AOL-HuffPo story (we'll just overlook the "Sammy/Sammay" inconsistency) is an oldie, and it comes in the final sentence:

In an ironic twist, Blackwell has a daughter named Caylee too, Channel 9 said.

Its claim to the contrary notwithstanding, that sentence suffers from an irony deficiency. As some tedious scolds never get tired of pointing out, irony and coincidence are not the same thing. The fact that the Casey Anthony doppelganger has a daughter named Caylee is a coincidence--and an astonishing one at that. It may even be a good enough reason to attempt to kill her. But it is not ironic.


On to the the fresh-from-the-mailbox Maclean's for another example of usage and abusage from the collection of greatest hits. In a capsule review of the Swedish thriller novel, The Hypnotist, comes this scene-setter:

Shortly before Christmas, almost an entire family is slaughtered in a Stockholm suburb, two parents and a two-year-old girl literally sliced to ribbons.

Charming. But, as some tedious scolds never get tired of pointing out, literally means literally, not "I-really-want-to-emphasize-or-hyperbolize-this."  It's unlikely the murderer actually filleted the family into sushi with such painstaking precision, especially since the following sentence tells us that another family member, a son, "though cut by as many knife wounds as the others, is still alive." Or perhaps Swedish surgeons are impressively adept at reconstituting ribbons into whole people. 

Irony Man

According to a "Cheat Sheet" summary on The Daily Beast, loathesome hack actor Charlie Sheen is probably headed to jail. However,

Owing to a high-paid lawyer and good behavior, that 30-day sentence is likely to be reduced to, ironically, two and a half weeks. Before heading to court, Sheen will be finishing up his court-mandated 36 hours of anger-management courses.

The reference to the reduced length of the sentence is a lame play on the lame title of the lame show Sheen stars in, Two and a Half Men. But I have to protest that while it may be coincidental that the execrable Sheen will serve two and a half weeks, it is not, in fact, ironic. Irony requires an element of oppositeness--it needs to be "poignantly contrary to what was expected or intended," to quote the American Heritage Dictionary. Now, if Sheen attacks his anger-management coach in a fit of rage, that would be ironic, as well as predictable.

Also on The Daily Beast today is a slide show feature on "hockey hunks" who date comely starlets (I tell you, the Beast breaks all the big stories). Want to know more about how Hilary Duff and Edmonton Oilers center Mike Comrie met on a plane ride to an Idaho resort? It was...

...a chance encounter that Comrie says was "maybe a bit of a fluke. [Hilary] calls it ironic."  

Hilary is wrong, puck-slapper. The chance meeting may have been improbable, but unless she was on that flight to get away from hockey players, it was hardly ironic.

Then, of course, we always have Alanis Morrisette's hit, Ironic, in which she croons about a series of misfortunes, coincidences, and bummers ("a black fly in your Chardonnay", etc.) and asks after each stanza, "isn't it ironic?" To which the only accurate riposte is, "No, it isn't." Cool song, anyway.

Bonus quibble: Awhile back I had a client confide to me that he had used the word ironical in conversation with a friend and was shamelessly ridiculed, because the word is ironic. I assured him that ironical is an acceptable variant with a respectable pedigree, and he promptly called his friend to settle the score. The fact that he then took me out for a round of drinks was neither coincidental nor ironic, but it was certainly agreeable.