Almost a year ago one of my blog entries discussed redundancies, and while that particular blog didn’t specifically discuss oxymorons, it did address the subject of using two incompatible words together in one expression.
Well, for no particular reason, I thought it might be good to explore the subject of oxymorons. I suppose I should point out that I just used a technically incorrect term by using oxymorons. If you’re referring to more than one oxymoron, they’re not called oxymorons, so what do you call them? The correct plural form of the word is oxymora.You may, or may not, have even ever heard of that word. Over the years, so many people have been saying oxymorons that — even though technically incorrect — the term is so widespread that it’s now considered an acceptable usage by most language scholars. But — if you want to be precise (and correct,) oxymora is the word to use.
We’ve all heard people use terms like old news, pretty ugly and serious fun without thinking much about it, but these expressions are all oxymorons. In fact we all use them in our speech and writings all the time, without ever thinking about it.
Just because I thought it would be interesting, and I didn’t have much to do, I took a little time and flipped through an issue of AARP magazine, the Smithsonian magazine and a couple of on-line news articles and just wrote down expressions that I would consider to be oxymorons. Surprisingly, there were more than I expected and they weren’t hard to spot.
[While I was browsing, it occurred to me that some of the articles contained what I’d call self-contradictory words and terms, such as almost (is is all or most?) aircraft black box (it’s painted orange.) and broker (this is a guy that’s suppose to be investing our money.)]
But back to oxymorons/oxymora — these are some that I found that I’d consider to be incompatible words used together…. paid volunteer, friendly takeover, authentic reproduction, small crowd, clearly misunderstood, continuing resolution, United States (think about that,) graduate student, experienced novice and only choice.
And — one that jumped out at me that I’m sure I wouldn’t have run across a couple of years ago — social distancing.
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