Oxymorons

An oxymoron (usual plural oxymorons, more rarely oxymora) is a rhetorical device that uses an ostensible self-contradiction to illustrate a rhetorical point or to reveal a paradox. A more general meaning of "contradiction in terms" (not necessarily for rhetoric effect) is recorded by the OED for 1902.

The term is first recorded as latinized Greek oxymōrum, in Maurus Servius Honoratus (c. AD 400); it is derived from the Greek ὀξύς oksús "sharp, keen, pointed" and μωρός mōros "dull, stupid, foolish"; as it were, "sharp-dull", "keenly stupid", or "pointedly foolish". The word oxymoron is autological, i.e. it is itself an example of an oxymoron. 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.

Oxymorons in the narrow sense are a rhetorical device used deliberately by the speaker, and intended to be understood as such by the listener. In a more extended sense, the term "oxymoron" has also been applied to inadvertent or incidential contradictions, as in the case of "dead metaphors" ("barely clothed", "terribly good"). Lederer (1990), in the spirit of "recreational linguistics", goes as far as to construct "logological oxymorons" such as reading the word nook as composed of "no" and "ok" or the surname Noyes as composed of "no" plus "yes", or far-fetched punning such as "divorce court" or "press release". There are a number of single-word oxymorons built from "dependent morphemes" (i.e. no longer a productive compound in English, but loaned as a compound from a different language), as with (lit. "with the hinder part before", compare husteron proteron, "", "", " etc.) or sopho-more (an artificial Greek compound, lit. "wise-foolish").

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