Oxymorons

I sat in class staring out the window. Grammar bored me. As for English language rules – to me if you listen and read carefully, you pick it up that way. My rebellious reverie was broken when I heard the last part of the teacher’s sentence “…and that was the figure of speech in the English language called an oxymoron”. A what? In a test I wrote: An oxymoron is a phrase turned on its head. I failed the question. 

Later on the school playground I overheard someone yelling to another: “Shit, I never swear!” The penny dropped. That was it. My fascination with oxymorons had started.

This figure of speech in which contradictory terms appear, continues to surprise and entertain. In its juxtaposition of truths often lies a greater truth. Some are wise, some wry, some humorous and all entertaining. Popular figures have turned some wonderful phrases:

• Lee Iacocca: “People want economy and they will pay any price to get it”.
• Dolly Parton: “You’d be surprised how much it costs to look this cheap”.
• Samuel Goldwyn: “A verbal contract isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on”.
• Polish writer Stanislaw Lee: “Even his ignorance is encyclopedic”.
• Paul Samuelson: "Wall Street indexes predicted nine out of the last five recessions”.
• Ava Gardner: “I am deeply superficial”.

The word oxymoron appeared in English for the first time in 1640. It has an interesting etymology -  in ancient Greek oxus means sharp or pointed and moros means dull or foolish. The word literally means sharp dullness which when you think about it is in itself an oxymoron. The plural of the word should be oxymora but somehow the acceptable usage has become oxymorons. Long before the Greeks, Chinese sages used the figure of speech.

• Lao-Tzu wrote: “To lead the people, walk behind them.”
• Confucius: “Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance”.
• Chuang-Tzu: “Happiness is the absence of striving for happiness”.

Oxymorons leave your mind in a spin. It disconcerts and pulls the mat from under you. It momentarily suspends belief and suddenly illuminates a new truth.  People in the fine arts have often given us jewels of contradictory phrasing in which the plight of the artist is portrayed.

• Edward Degas: “Painting is easy when you don’t know how but difficult when you do”.
• Pablo Picasso: “Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction”.
• Eugene Delacroix: “Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who attain it in nothing.”

The oxymoron often contains a paradox; act naturally, clearly confused, open secret, noticeable absence. Someone once wrote “A paradox is truth standing on its head to attract our attention”. 

Thinkers have been fascinated by the concept of paradox and Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard stated: “The paradox is the source of the thinker’s passion, and the thinker without a paradox is like a lover without feeling; a paltry mediocrity.” Henry David Thoreau put it more succinctly: “Truth is always paradoxical”. 

Author Clive James said: “Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense dancing”. Humor implies the ability to shift perspective and to view life from a different angle. Where there is humor, so often there is common sense.

• Everett Dirksen: “I am a man of unbending principles; the first is to be flexible at all times”.
• Bill Vaughan: “If there is anything the nonconformist hates worse than a conformist, it’s another nonconformist who doesn’t conform to the prevailing standard of nonconformity”.

Back to my school days. Eventually I did get the answer correct courtesy of The Oxford English Dictionary: An oxymoron is a rhetorical figure of speech by which contradictory or incongruous terms are conjoined so as to give point to the statement of expression. Understanding my confusion was terribly good.

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Source: Dr M Grothe. Oxymoronica. Harper Collins. Glasgow. 2008

Image credit: scribendi.com