Let's face it, the media have killed the word "oxymoron." And now they're working on killing the underlying concept.
In recent days, I've seen "underage women," "high-yield bonds" and "Trump Presidential Library" labeled as oxymorons in news items. Generally, if you're labeling it, it's not an oxymoron.
An oxymoron is a rhetorical device in which seemingly contradictory or incongruous terms appear in conjunction with each other. Oxymoron is made up of two words that are Greek to me. Well, actually, they're Greek to everyone. Oxus means sharp or keen. Moros means dull or foolish. The word itself is a contradiction in terms.
Popular oxymorons include "cruel kindness," "original copy" and "deafening silence." These phrases consist of an adjective and a noun and are, literally, contradictory. Some scholars call these "natural" oxymorons.
Just about anyone who speaks English can perceive the incongruity in each pair. Natural oxymorons find their way into the language as stand-alone units. They shed the humor that spawned their coining and are routinely and seriously used. No label needed.
At the opposite extreme are "comical oxymorons." These are led by a couple made famous by George Carlin: "military intelligence" and "jumbo shrimp." Neither of which is, in truth, an oxymoron. Both of which depend on the existence of true oxymorons for their comic effect.
Shrimp did not originally mean small. Even now, it does not mean small in the sense that jumbo means large. Yes, shrimp is a small fish, but its name did not take on the connotation of being little until people started calling other people shrimps.
So part of the incongruity in a comical oxymoron involves an appreciation of the evolution in meaning of a key portion of the term. Jumbo shrimp is actually a punchline. Of a joke, the essence of which is to call jumbo shrimp an oxymoron when it really isn't.
Similarly, military intelligence is such a joke. And it only works if the hearer or reader is told it's an oxymoron, works out the incongruity, and is amused by a slam against soldiers.
In both of these examples, express or implicit labeling is used by the joker.
"Situational" oxymorons involve more than two words. Chief among these are "parking in a driveway," "running on a walkway" and "sitting in the stands."
There are some one-word oxymorons, though they have dual aspects somewhere. "Sophomore" is made up of two words that mean wise fool. "Preposterous," the first two syllables of which are opposites, pre and post. "Pianoforte," which you probably don't say of as often as preposterous sophomores, is a combination of words that mean soft and loud.
Richard Lederer characterizes the above examples as "single-word oxymora composed of dependent morphemes," distinguishing them from one-word contradictions composed of independent morphemes. Illustrative of the latter are firewater, spendthrift, bridegroom, bittersweet and ballpoint.
A morpheme is "a distinctive collocation of phonemes ... having no smaller meaningful parts." A phoneme is "any of the abstract units of the phonetic system of a language that correspond to a set of similar speech sounds ... which are perceived to be a single distinctive sound in the language."
Applying these principles to the news items above, one should conclude there are no oxymorons among them. Just moronic efforts at humor.
------------v------------
Vic Fleming is a Little Rock District Court judge, law professor, writer and crossword-puzzle author.
Editorial on 07/25/2019