Web Dictionaries Are The Devil

From StoneHome

I was browsing one of the hated web dictionaries looking for fodder in my ongoing quest to fight the diseased spread of .com definition which is pervading IRC, and I saw an (s/an/another/) entry which made my skin crawl. I kid you not, I nearly defecated in my chair. In the path of my plan to use the ever-awful definition of irony as easy fodder, there sat before me a whole new order, novel category, never-before-seen echelon of badness and ungoodosity in dictionary definitions.

Form three of irony was a compound phrase: "Morisettan irony."

Now, I'm all for progressive change in the English language. It's a real, measurable thing. It also takes a few hundred years, not a handful years, and one bad album based on the recent common misunderstanding of a word does not a definition establish. See also Ignorance isn't linguistic drift. The thing which kills me is that there's no need for irony to take on this new, false meaning, which is well covered; there is not, however, another word which means what irony actually means. We are losing specificity to no gain in order to use what seems like a sophisticated word quite blindly. (Not, ahem, that this is anything particularly new. Go, team.)