My heart is yours to fill or burst

Edit: Here is a good example of irony.
http://www.snopes.com/humor/mediagoofs/sixpence.asp

I'm drowning in the spicy juice of vindication.

One of my pet peeves is that the average person misuses the word irony. They simply don't know what it means, and popular media propogates its misuse. Simply put, people have no idea what irony is. Of course, I have always used Alanis Morissette's ever popular song, Ironic, to demonstrate my point. Most of the situations she describes are not ironic. Rain on your wedding day? That's unfortunate. Bad planning - maybe. Ironic? No. Good advice you just didn't take? That's just stupidity, or maybe stubbornness. Once again: not ironic.

Recently, Sabrina notified me of this anecdote (I'm paraphrasing):

She was sitting near a class that was just beginning, and it turned out to be an English class. The prof began the lecture by playing Ms. Morissette's Ironic. After the song was done playing, the prof told the students to go home and rewrite the song so that the situations are actually ironic.

Something came to me though. What if the irony of the song is the title? I started thinking about it, and I decided that Alanis just wasn't that smart. And some lyrics in the song support that... "Isn't it ironic/Yeah I really do think". Plus, there's nothing to suggest that she was playing a clever prank on the listener.

Don't misunderstand - irony is a hard concept to explain. Don't misuse it if you don't know, though. It was explained to me by one of my english teachers/professors as:

The perfect inversion to what one would expect.

I will illustrate (this isn't the best example - it's hard to create irony, which is what makes it so great):

Someone walks into an Adult Video store, and later walks out with only a Pixar video.