Oxymoron

This article is about the contradiction in terms. For the punk band, see Oxymoron (band).

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

Types

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:

• Dark sunshine
• Happy depression
• Amazing dullness
• Cold sun
• Living Dead
• Dark Light
• Cold Summer
• Smart Failure

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

"The silence whistles"

from Nathan Alterman's Summer Night.

Oxymorons, however, are not always simply a pair of words side-by-side, but can also be devised in the meaning of certain sentences or phrases. The poem below serves as an example of various situational oxymorons, in which every single line contains an oxymoron:

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!

Etymology

From 5th century Latin "oxymoron", from Ancient Greek "ὀξύς" (oxus, sharp) + "μωρός" (mōros, dull) Greek "ὀξύμωρον" (oxumōron) is not found in the extant Greek sources, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Inadvertent oxymorons

Oxymorons are sometimes inadvertently created by errors or sloppiness in conversation; common examples include extremely average, objective opinion, and original copy.

In some cases an inadvertent oxymoron ends up being widely adopted as the name for some concept, in which case it may cease to be recognised as an oxymoron. Cases where this has occurred include bittersweet, virtual reality, constant variable, and living dead.

Oxymorons as puns

A great 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.

There are also many examples where terms that are superficially contradictory are juxtaposed in such a way that there is no contradiction. Examples include same difference, jumbo shrimp (shrimp means "a small person" in children's slang but in this context is used to mean a literal shrimp), pretty ugly (in which context pretty means rather, not attractive) and hot ice (hot and ice mean "stolen" and "diamonds", respectively, in criminal argot). Whether or not these may legitimately be called oxymorons is debatable.

Oxymorons as paradoxes

Often a writer will use an oxymoron in order to deliberately call attention to a contradiction. For example Wilfred Owen, in his poem The Send-off refers to soldiers leaving for the front line, who "lined the train with faces grimly gay. " In this case the oxymoron grimly gay highlights the contradiction between how the soldiers feel and how they act: though putting on a brave face and acting cheerful, they actually feel grim.

One case where many oxymorons are used 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 that become clichés:

• Civil War
• Irregular Pattern
• Deafening silence
• Forward retreat
• Same sex marriage
• Friendly Fire
• Jumbo Shrimp
• Peaceful War
• Quiet Riot
• Serious Joke
• Silent Scream
• Sweet sorrow

Terms falsely called oxymorons for rhetorical effect

Although a true oxymoron is “something that is surprisingly true, a paradox”, modern usage has brought a common misunderstanding as being near synonymous with a contradiction. The introduction of this usage, the opposite of its true meaning, has been credited to William F. Buckley.

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", "government worker", "honest broker", "educational television", and "French Army".

Taxonomy

Richard Lederer assembled a taxonomy of oxymorons in an article in Word Ways in 1990, 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 expression that were deliberately crafted to be contradictory, such as the Tennyson quote above, and those phrases that inadvertently or incidentally contain a contradiction (often as a result of a punning use of one or both words).

Visual and physical oxymorons

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. "

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:."

• 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

Oxymorons in product names

• Dodge Ram (now simply just the Ram 1500)

See also

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

References

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

Further reading

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