Word Play: Oxymoron

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Today is Friday March 18th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. You should know, we’re a team of hard-working journalists, but sometimes it takes a cartoonist to make a point more succinctly than we can ever hope to. George Grant is about to demonstrate how a well-placed editorial cartoon can get you thinking.

GEORGE GRANT, COMMENTATOR: Whenever the latest issue of WORLD Magazine arrives in the mail, I typically turn first to the book reviews. But a few weeks ago, I stopped short upon seeing a Steve Kelley cartoon. It depicted a father and mother overlooking their elementary-age son staring into a digital screen emblazoned with the phrase “remote learning.” The dad commented, “Today’s class must be about oxymorons.” I chuckled and then immediately thought, “Oh, now that needs to be a Word Play!” Amidst a culture fraught with polarizing contrariness and obstreperous contradiction, what subject could be more apt than oxymorons?

An oxymoron is a figure of speech pairing two antithetical or contradictory concepts. Samuel Johnson defined it as, “a rhetorical figure in which an epithet of a quite contrary signification is added to any word or phrase creating a contradiction in terms.” Oxymorons are common, often unconscious, literary devices. They are used for emphasis and have the effect of creating an impression, enhancing a concept, or highlighting an image.

Simple or single-word oxymorons include the terms audiovisual, bittersweet, featherweight, outcome, sleepwalk, and spendthrift. More common are complex or double-word oxymorons, such as act natural, baby grand, benign neglect, civil war, cruel joke, deafening silence, and definite possibility. There are phrases like doing nothing, dotted line, down escalator, dull roar, final draft, freezer burn, front end, half empty, and inside out. Or there are lead balloons, leisure industries, local celebrities, loss leaders, minor disasters, and open secrets. Or perhaps you’ve used one of these: pretty ugly, sight unseen, strangely familiar, sure bet, and terribly good.

Complex oxymorons often make their appearance in our complex public discourse. Think of assisted suicide, constructive criticism, conventional wisdom, global village, initial results, normal deviation, old news, unbiased opinion, questionable answer, virtual reality, and working vacation.

Composite oxymorons humorously combine opposing ideas to create what limericst Ogden Nash called, “nonsensical sense.” For instance, Clara Barton said, “I distinctly remember forgetting that.” George Bernard Shaw declared, “Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that we can never learn anything from history.” Oscar Wilde admitted, “I can resist everything but temptation.” And, Yogi Berra asserted, “I never said most of the things I said.”

Hollywood mogul Samuel Goldwyn was as famous for his oxymoronic declarations as he was for the films he produced. He said, “A verbal contract isn’t worth the paper it’s written on;” and, “Anyone who goes to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined;” and, “I don’t think anyone should write their autobiography until after they're dead;” and, “Thank God I’m an atheist.”

Oxymorons seem to abound. In fact, even the word oxymoron is an oxymoron—it comes to us from two contradictory Greek terms, oxus meaning sharp or pointed and moros meaning dull or foolish.

So, I’m not going to say, “I told you so,” but oxymorons really do crop up everywhere.

I’m George Grant.

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