> “Ironically, one of the safest places to be right now is in a cleanroom,” points out Thomas Sonderman, president of SkyWater Technology, in Bloomington, Minn.
That's not irony! If it's usually dangerous to be in a clean room, then it is an irony. If they were running a clean room in a virus lab, now that's irony.
What they have is probably an Alanis Morissette song...
This is the sort of thing where in person people would chuckle and move on, but on the internet it leads to a cascade. We all have associations that we can't quite resist adding, and pretty soon it dominates the thread, an outcome no one actually wants.
Under the current circumstances, "going to work" is considered dangerous due to the social interaction. But employees going to this workplace are arguably safer than they would be at home, because it's a clean room. (Whether this is true or not is sort of an open question.)
That's irony, as typically understood.
Sitting here raging at minor errors has always been so weird to me.
Another word like this is 'crisis'. It went from meaning "decision" in old Greek to something like "tipping point, or a time of major change" to how most people use it today "time when lots of bad stuff happens". Much of English is poorly translated and pronounced French. Déranger in French is to bother, to be deranged in English... French itself being malformed Roman... you get the picture.
If you go chasing what words "really" mean, you'll learn that almost all of English is loan words which mean something not entirely unlike the word borrowed, and you'll end up trying to reconstruct 7000 year old languages to get to the bottom of a bottomless well.
Latin