I was reading an article about the Hatton fight in which the author  used the word 'ironic' many times, instead of 'coincidental'.  Conicidentally enough,  Alex called me today and said the he had dificulty defining 'irony', when confronted with the same sort of person earlier in the day.

I happen to keep a copy of Kingley Amis's "The Kings English" at my desk, because I am a geek. Lets see what he has to say.

It used to be said with some meaning that things like abrupt, spectacular but somehow appropriate reversals of fortune where ironical, partaking of irony in a sense well defined in COD as:

ill-timed or perverse arrival of event or circumstance in itself desirable, due to the feigned good will and actual malice of (Fate, curcumstance etc.),

thought it might be fair to add that the arrival of misfortune hard upon some exceptional success would also have been accounted irony, or an irony. Thus the diagnosis of terminal cancer in a young man crippled from birth, now newly embarked on a promising career in law, was probably called ironical among other things by some of those concerned.

    Recently all seriousness seems to have departed from the word. The slightest and most banal coincidence or point of resemblance or even just-perceptible absence of one, unworthy of a single grunt of interest, gets called ironical.  The other day I read somewhere of how ironical it was that the going at last year's particular horse-race was perceptibly either better or worse than that predicted this year, I forget which.