by Mel Mcintyre

Created on: February 05, 2010

What is an oxymoron? Is it just a stupid cow?

Far from it. 

An oxymoron is a figure of speech in which two contrasting ideas are juxtaposed, such as cold fire or controlled chaos. Like most figures of speech, oxymorons come in a range of shapes and sizes, from deliberate puns like same difference to inadvertent occurrences such as you’d find when using a metal wood.

The word oxymoron comes from Ancient Greek and is a combination of the words oxus and moros. Not surprisingly, their combined meaning makes an oxymoron, namely “sharply dull.”

Common Usage
We use oxymorons all the time without probably paying them too much attention, such as old boy, little man, deafening silence, little giant or final draft. And there are plenty of references in the literature we read, too, such as this familiar line from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet:

“Parting is such sweet sorrow.”

Or this well-known example from the same play:

"O heavy lightness!
Serious vanity!
Mis-shapen chaos of well-seeming forms!
Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health!"

Charles Lamb puts it like this in his essay The Old Margate Hoy:

“I like a smuggler. He is the only honest thief.”

Watch What You Say
Oxymorons are all around us. Ever seen a baby grand? Gotten freezer burn on that partially used bag of peas? Taken a ride on an elevated subway? Watched a couple of light heavyweights go at it?

These days virtual reality is all the rage, but what is that exactly? It’s an oxymoron, for sure, as is the phrase “living dead” or the concept of a one-man band. And the world we live in? It’s often described as a global village.

Tell a bad joke and what happens? It goes down like a lead balloon. And unless you’re alone in a crowd, you’d do well to avoid describing someone as pretty ugly.

Sloppy Talk
Like other figures of speech, oxymorons can result from our own propensity for laziness. We often make mistakes when speaking or writing, because we’re trying to get across an idea rather than necessarily worrying about how we get that idea across. For instance, have you ever been asked to give your objective opinion about something?

Sometimes we adopt oxymorons into our vocabularies completely, like the term bittersweet, which no longer operates as an oxymoron but instead identifies a feeling or concept. 

Of course, if the production of an oxymoron is unintentional, that’s different. Then it’s known as a contradictio in terminis, which is Latin for a contradiction in terms. You might say that, in those circumstances, oxymorons appear accidentally on purpose.

And you could quite legitimately describe that as old news.

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