"conventionally unconventional", "tortuous spontaneity" ( Henry James) "faith unfaithful", "falsely true" ( Tennyson), "expressive silence" ( Thomson, echoing Cicero's Latin: cum tacent clamant, lit.'when they are silent, they cry out'), "hateful good" ( Chaucer, translating odibile bonum) Other examples from English-language literature include: This love feel I, that feel no love in this. Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is! One classic example of the use of oxymorons in English literature can be found in this example from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, where Romeo strings together thirteen in a row:įeather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health! The most common form of oxymoron involves an adjective– noun combination of two words, but they can also be devised in the meaning of sentences or phrases. "with the hinder part before", compare hysteron proteron, " upside-down", " head over heels", " ass-backwards" etc.) or sopho-more (an artificial Greek compound, lit. no longer a productive compound in English, but loaned as a compound from a different language), as with pre-posterous (lit. There are a number of single-word oxymorons built from "dependent morphemes" (i.e.
MISSHAPEN ANTONYM PLUS
Lederer (1990), in the spirit of "recreational linguistics", goes as far as to construct "logological oxymorons" such as reading the word nook composed of "no" and "ok" or the surname Noyes as composed of "no" plus "yes", or far-fetched punning such as "divorce court", "U.S.
In a more extended sense, the term "oxymoron" has also been applied to inadvertent or incidental contradictions, as in the case of " dead metaphors" ("barely clothed" or "terribly good"). Oxymorons in the narrow sense are a rhetorical device used deliberately by the speaker, and intended to be understood as such by the listener. The Greek compound word ὀξύμωρον oksýmōron, which would correspond to the Latin formation, does not seem to appear in any known Ancient Greek works prior to the formation of the Latin term. AD 400) it is derived from the Greek word ὀξύς oksús "sharp, keen, pointed" and μωρός mōros "dull, stupid, foolish" as it were, "sharp-dull", "keenly stupid", or "pointedly foolish".
The term oxymoron is first recorded as Latinized Greek oxymōrum, in Maurus Servius Honoratus (c. A general meaning of "contradiction in terms" is recorded by the 1902 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. As a rhetorical device, an oxymoron illustrates a point to communicate and reveal a paradox. Oxymorons are acutely silly words that communicate contradiction.Īn oxymoron (plurals: oxymorons and oxymora) is a figure of speech that juxtaposes concepts with opposite meanings within a word or in a phrase that is a self-contradiction.
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