Oxymoron

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An oxymoron (plural oxymorons or the Greek plural oxymora) (from Greek ὀξύμωρον, "sharp dull") is a figure of speech that combines normally-contradictory terms. Oxymorons appear in a variety of contexts, including inadvertent errors such as extremely average, deliberate puns like same difference or pretty ugly, and literary oxymorons crafted to reveal a paradox.

The most common form of oxymoron involves an adjective-noun combination of two words. For example, the following line from Tennyson's Idylls of the King contains two oxymorons:

"And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true."

Other oxymorons of this kind include the following:

• Failed success
• Dark sunshine
• Safe risks
• Happy depression
• Amazing dullness
• Cold sun
• Living dead
• Dark light
• Smart failure
• Investment property
• General specific
• Pop Punk

Less often seen are noun-verb combinations of two words, such as the line

"The silence whistles"

from Nathan Alterman's Summer Night.

Oxymorons are not always a pair of words; they can also be devised in the meaning of sentences or phrases. The poem below, in which every line contains an oxymoron, serves as an example of various situational oxymorons:

One fine day in the middle of the night,

Two dead boys got up to fight,

Back to back they faced each other,

Drew their swords and shot each other,

One was blind and the other couldn't see,

So they chose a dummy for a referee.

A blind man went to see fair play,

A dumb man went to shout "hooray!"

A paralysed donkey passing by,

Kicked the blind man in the eye,

Knocked him through a nine inch wall,

Into a dry ditch and drowned them all,

A deaf policeman heard the noise,

And came to arrest the two dead boys,

If you don't believe this story’s true,

Ask the blind man; he saw it too!^{[citation needed]}

Oxymoron is derived from the 5th century Latin "oxymoron", which is derived from the Ancient Greek "ὀξύς" (oxus, sharp) + "μωρός" (mōros, dull).^[1] The Greek "ὀξύμωρον" (oxumōron) is not found in the extant Greek sources, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.^[2]

Richard Lederer assembled a taxonomy of oxymorons in an article in Word Ways in 1990,^[3] running from single-word oxymorons such as "pianoforte" (literally, "soft-loud") through "doublespeak oxymora" (deliberately intended to confuse) and "opinion oxymora" (editorial opinions designed to provoke a laugh). In general, oxymorons can be divided into expressions that were deliberately crafted to be contradictory and those phrases that inadvertently or incidentally contain a contradiction, often as a result of a punning use of one or both words.

Oxymorons are sometimes inadvertently created by errors or sloppiness in conversation; common examples include extremely average, objective opinion, original copy, and definite possibility. In some cases an inadvertent oxymoron ends up being widely adopted as the name for some concept and ceases to be recognised as an oxymoron. Cases where this has occurred include bittersweet, virtual reality, constant variable, and living dead.^{[citation needed]}

Many oxymorons have been popularised in vernacular speech. Unlike literary oxymorons, many of these are not intended to construct a paradox; they are simply puns. Examples include controlled chaos, open secret, organized mess, alone in a crowd, and accidentally on purpose.^{[citation needed]}

There are also examples in which terms that are superficially contradictory are juxtaposed in such a way that there is no contradiction. Examples include same difference, jumbo shrimp, pretty ugly, and hot ice (where hot and ice mean stolen and diamonds, respectively, in criminal argot). Whether these may legitimately be called oxymorons is debatable.^{[according to whom?]}

Writers often use an oxymoron to call attention to an apparent contradiction. For example, Wilfred Owen's poem The Send-off refers to soldiers leaving for the front line, who "lined the train with faces grimly gay." The oxymoron grimly gay highlights the contradiction between how the soldiers feel and how they act: though they put on a brave face and act cheerful, they feel grim.

One case where many oxymorons are strung together can be found in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, where Romeo declares:

"O heavy lightness! Serious vanity!
Mis-shapen chaos of well-seeming forms!
Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health!"

Some paradoxical oxymorons become clichés:

• Irregular pattern
• Deafening silence
• Forward retreat
• Friendly fire
• Quiet riot
• Serious joke
• Silent Scream
• Sweet sorrow

Although a true oxymoron is "something that is surprisingly true, a paradox", modern usage has brought a common misunderstanding^{[according to whom?]} that oxymoron is nearly synonymous with contradiction. The introduction of this usage, the opposite of its true meaning, has been credited to William F. Buckley.^[4]

Sometimes a pair of terms is claimed to be an oxymoron by those who hold the opinion that the two are mutually exclusive. That is, although there is no inherent contradiction between the terms, the speaker expresses the opinion that the two terms imply properties or characteristics that cannot occur together. Such claims may be made purely for humorous effect; many examples, such as military intelligence, were popularized by comedian George Carlin. Another example is the term civil war, which is not an oxymoron, but can be claimed to be so for humorous effect, if civil is construed as meaning polite rather than between citizens of the same state. Alternatively, such claims may reflect a genuinely held opinion or ideological position. Well-known examples include claims made against "military intelligence", "American culture", "government worker", "honest broker" and "educational television".

In his book More On Oxymoron, the artist Patrick Hughes discusses and gives examples of visual oxymorons. He writes:

"In the visual version of oxymoron, the material of which a thing is made (or appears to be made) takes the place of the adjectiνe, and the thing itself (or thing represented) takes the place of the noun."^[5]

Examples include waves in the sand, a fossil tree and topiary representing something solid like an ocean liner. Hughes lists further examples of oxymoronic objects including:^[6]

• Plastic lemons
• Electric candles
• Rubber bones for dogs
• Floating soap
• China eggs to persuade hens to lay
• Solid water (ice)
• Bricked-up windows
• Artificial grass
• Wax fruit
• Invisible ink
• Glass hammers
• Joke rubber coat hooks
• Solid wooden bottle molds

• Colorless green ideas sleep furiously
• Contradictio in terminis
• Paradox
• Performative contradiction
• Self refuting idea
• Wooden iron

• Smyth, Herbert Weir (1920). Greek Grammar. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. p. 680. ISBN 0-674-36250-0.

• Shen, Yeshayahu (1987). "On the structure and understanding of poetic oxymoron". Poetics Today. 8 (1): 105–122. doi:10.2307/1773004.