Q. Could you provide a few examples of the word ironic (or irony)? Sometimes I think I hear it applied incorrectly, as when it is used to mean a person is funny, like a comedian or something that makes one laugh. I thought irony needed to have another condition attached to humor (and that something doesn't need to be funny to be ironic).

A. Irony has several senses, as you have noted. Irony involves incongruity, and that is ultimately a state of two things not agreeing, not being consistent or harmonious.

The sense in Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary that is broadest is "incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result." Thus, someone might say he or she was struck by the irony of a vegetarian working at a hamburger stand.

In today’s so-called postmodern world, irony is a common stance of many comedians and of much trendy advertising. If there is, according to typical postmodern theory, no master narrative that guides our perceptions and experiences, then every cultural moment is an opportunity to undercut what is there, even, yes, the mundane details of daily existence. This can go beyond humor alone, to something more existential.

We should note, however, that the ironic stance is not a new development. Nietzsche, for one, articulated a modern point of view of restless searching and analysis, like a dog chasing its own tail. And Herman Melville depicted an ironic world, which is nicely described in John Seelye’s The Ironic Diagram which focuses on all the searchers in Melville’s stories, who can’t really ever touch and grasp the ultimate truths and answers they are looking for. But they keep trying, as ironic as it clearly is.

So, as you say, irony is a broad term, not limited to humor. Indeed, as with Melville’s whaling ship, captained by a questing, obsessive madman, it can range all the way to tragedy.

Q. Just because many use the term irregardless does not mean it is a word. Why would you state such a thing. By stating the term is a word, you are promoting such ignorance.

A. You ask why we've called irregardless a word; the simple answer is, because it is. It has shown up occasionally in print, and it is well-known ( if often maligned) by English speakers. But, as we note in our usage paragraph, the fact that it is a word does not mean that its use is uncontested or acceptable. In fact, we advise strongly that you use regardless instead.

So why enter it at all? We tend to take a more descriptive (as opposed to prescriptive) approach to lexicography; that is, we do not enter words based on whether we think they should be used, but rather based on whether they are used in current, widely read publications. For that reason, we felt that if irregardless is widely used in spoken English and occasionally in written English, and if people have questions about it, it would be best to enter it and so offer some guidance about it. After all, a dictionary that does not enter words that are not approved of can’t say much about them. You have to enter a word if you want to warn against it.

In all of this, we are following Noah Webster's great guiding principle that "the business of the lexicographer is to collect, arrange, and define, as far as possible, all the words that belong to a language, and leave the author to select from them at his pleasure and according to his judgment."

Q. A book I am reading includes this sentence: “British merchants could import the spoil of India and Moluccas: opium and mummie and sharks' fin and edible birds' nest.” Can you tell me what mummie means in this context?

A. Based on the context you provide, we think it's most likely that the "mummie" referred to is that defined at sense 1 of the noun entry for mummy in our Unabridged Dictionary:

1 : a concoction formerly used as a medicament or drug containing powdered parts of a human or animal body

This is the oldest sense of the word mummy, which in Middle English was spelled mummie. Spelling in English has not been stable for most of the language's history, so we would not be surprised if the mummie spelling of this term survived into modern English, at least in some parts of the world.