Oxymoron

All Music Guide:

Oxymoron began in the early '90s when the punk scene had again been driven to the underground and the mainstream was making the transition from hard rock to grunge and metal. They played a form of Oi! music that resisted the stereotyped racial issues that plagued the genre in the mainstream's eyes and instead was one of the first revivalists to emphasize that the music was still a viable force in the underground. Continuing their efforts into the next century, the band stands as a model for carefully designing a career around a genre that has fallen out of favor with many over misunderstood intentions.

Wikipedia:

An oxymoron (plural oxymora or oxymorons) (from Greek ὀξύμωρον, "sharp dull") is a figure of speech that combines contradictory terms. Oxymora appear in a variety of contexts, including inadvertent errors such as ground pilot and literary oxymorons crafted to reveal a paradox.

Types [edit]

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 oxymora:

Other examples of oxymora of this kind are:

Less often seen are noun-verb combinations of two words, such as the line "The silence whistles" from Nathan Alterman's Summer Night, or in a record album title like Sounds of Silence.

Oxymora are not always a pair of words; they can also be devised in the meaning of sentences or phrases.

Etymology [edit]

Oxymoron is derived from the 5th century Latin "oxymoron", which is derived from the Ancient Greek: ὀξύς oxus "sharp, keen" + μωρός mōros "dull, stupid", making the word itself an oxymoron. The combined Greek form "ὀξύμωρον" (oxumōron) does not in fact appear in the extant Greek sources, however.

Taxonomy [edit]

Richard Lederer assembled a taxonomy of oxymora in an article in Word Ways in 1990, running from single-word oxymora 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, oxymora 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.

Apparent oxymora [edit]

Many oxymora have been popularised in vernacular speech. Examples include controlled chaos, open secret, organized mess, alone in a crowd, and accidentally on purpose.

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 means stolen and ice means diamonds, respectively, in criminal argot).

Oxymora as paradoxes [edit]

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 cheerfully, they feel grim.

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

Some paradoxical oxymora become clichés:

Terms falsely called oxymora for rhetorical effect [edit]

Although a true oxymoron is "something that is surprisingly true, a paradox," Garry Wills has argued that modern usage has brought a common misunderstanding that oxymoron is nearly synonymous with contradiction. The introduction of this misuse, 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, freedom fighters, business ethics 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 "government worker", "honest broker", "educational television," "Microsoft Works" and "working from home".

Visual and physical oxymora [edit]

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 adjective, 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:

Other languages [edit]

Oxymora, in the sense of "single-word oxymora" such as "pianoforte", are very common in Chinese and neighboring languages such as Japanese, and consist of two opposing Chinese characters. Archetypal examples include 男女 (man and woman, male and female, gender), 陰陽 (yin and yang), 善悪 (good and evil, morality), and are used to indicate couples, ranges, or the trait that these are extremes of.