40 Fun Facts About Oxymorons

Which American term for a student is popularly explained as a Greek compound meaning wise fool?

Sophomore is often read as Greek sophos, wise, plus moros, foolish, a dig at second-year students who think they know it all. Etymologists trace it to an older word, sophumer, meaning arguer.

Which musical instrument has a full Italian name that joins the words for soft and loud?

Piano is short for pianoforte, from an Italian phrase meaning harpsichord with soft and loud. The harder a key is pressed, the harder its hammer hits the strings and the louder the note.

Which 1994 spy comedy starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis has an oxymoron for a title?

True Lies casts Schwarzenegger as a government agent hiding his double life as a spy from his unknowing wife. Its screenplay reworks La Totale!, a 1991 French comedy.

Which fantasy author believed his own surname came from a German word meaning foolhardy, a literal twin of oxymoron?

JRR Tolkien believed his name came from tollkühn, foolhardy, an idea researchers now call a false etymology. He even slipped himself into one story under the translated name Rashbold.

Which Shakespeare play has its lovesick hero reel off a string of oxymorons, including cold fire and sick health?

Romeo and Juliet has its hero pour out the clashing phrases in the very first scene, while he is still pining for a girl called Rosaline. The speech leans on love-poetry clichés that were already hackneyed.

Which seafood phrase did writer Richard Lederer call probably the best-known oxymoron in the United States?

Jumbo shrimp works because shrimp can also mean someone small, so the phrase seems to say huge and tiny at once. Comedian George Carlin spread the joke on his 1974 album Toledo Window Box.

Which nation's people did columnist Walter Winchell suggest calling frienemies in 1953, an early use of the blend?

The Russians were the target of Walter Winchell's headline, but a Kansas newspaper had printed frienemies as far back as 1891. Now spelled frenemy, the blend packs friend and enemy into one word.

Which folk duo topped the US chart in 1966 with a song whose title pairs sound with silence?

Simon & Garfunkel first cut The Sound of Silence as an acoustic track that sold poorly in 1964. Their producer overdubbed electric instruments without telling them, and the remix reached number one.

Which army-related phrase did comedian George Carlin help popularize in 1975 as a joke oxymoron?

Military intelligence got its laugh from the hint that armies and brains never mix. Carlin dropped the line while hosting the first episode of Saturday Night Live, and such jokes are now called opinion oxymorons.

Which naturalist coined the contradictory-sounding term living fossil while describing the platypus and a lungfish?

Charles Darwin wrote in On the Origin of Species that such oddities may almost be called living fossils. The label later stuck to the coelacanth, found alive in 1938 after being thought extinct for 66 million years.

The Greek word oxys, which begins both oxymoron and oxygen, carries which basic meaning?

Sharp is the sense of oxys, while the second half of oxymoron, moros, means foolish, so the word contradicts itself. Lavoisier built oxygen on the same root because he took the gas for the maker of acids.

Which figure of speech, built on a comparison word, appears in the title of Madonna's album Like a Virgin?

Simile is the name for a comparison flagged by a word such as like or as. Say that one thing simply is another, with no comparison word, and the figure becomes a metaphor.

Which term names a whole statement that seems to contradict itself yet may hold, such as less is more?

Paradox covers a full statement or argument that defies common sense, while an oxymoron squeezes the same clash into a single word or a short phrase such as cruel kindness.

Which single-word oxymoron is also the common name of a climbing nightshade with poisonous red berries?

Bittersweet is a common name for Solanum dulcamara, a vine whose berries taste intensely bitter and are said to leave a sweet aftertaste. They are poisonous to people and livestock alike.

Nick Lowe's 1979 hit Cruel to Be Kind takes its oxymoronic title from a line in which Shakespeare tragedy?

Hamlet has its prince use the phrase in the scene where he scolds his mother, Gertrude. Nick Lowe's song sat on a 1978 B-side until his record label talked him into re-recording it as a single.

Which Stanley Kubrick film, starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, has a title that contradicts itself?

Eyes Wide Shut was the director's last film: he delivered his final cut to the studio in March 1999 and died of a heart attack six days later.

Which boxing weight class, sitting just below cruiserweight, has a name that works as an oxymoron?

Light heavyweight covers professional boxers above 168 pounds and up to 175. Richard Lederer filed the name among his natural oxymorons, beside original copy and random order.

The Chinese word for contradiction, maodun, joins the characters for which two items in a merchant's boast?

Spear and shield are the wares in a story from the Han Feizi: a seller swore his spear could pierce anything and his shield could stop everything. Asked to try one on the other, he had no answer.

The most common form of oxymoron, as in cruel kindness, pairs a noun with which other part of speech?

An adjective set against a noun it seems to rule out is the standard recipe, but the clash can also be built into the meaning of a whole phrase or sentence.

Which oxymoron describes the scripted nature of pro wrestling, known to all fans yet never admitted in the ring?

Open secret is the usual label for kayfabe, wrestling's pretense that its fights are unscripted. Israel's nuclear arsenal is another example: generally acknowledged, yet never confirmed by its government.

Besides oxymorons, which other plural of the word oxymoron do dictionaries such as Merriam-Webster accept?

Oxymora was the plural Richard Lederer preferred when he drew up a mock-serious classification of the things in 1990. He named the new field oxymoronology.

Which English word for something absurd comes from a Latin term that literally means before-behind?

Preposterous goes back to Latin praeposterus, built from prae, before, and posterus, coming after. It first described things in reverse order, like a cart put before the horse.

Which Italian art term, linked with Caravaggio and Rembrandt, literally means bright-dark?

Chiaroscuro joins the Italian chiaro, clear or bright, to oscuro, dark. The technique grew up in the Renaissance but is most closely tied to Baroque painting.

Which stage genre has a name coined half in jest by the Roman playwright Plautus for a play mixing gods and slaves?

Tragicomedy began as tragicomoedia in the prologue to Amphitryon, where the god Mercury decides that a play with kings and gods beside servants cannot be called a plain comedy.

Which label did psychiatrist William Menninger give World War II soldiers who resisted by pouting and stalling?

Passive-aggressive was Colonel Menninger's term for men who never defied an order outright but showed their hostility through stubbornness, procrastination and inefficiency.

Dickens begins A Tale of Two Cities by setting the best of times against the worst, a textbook case of which device?

Antithesis places two opposites side by side for contrast, and the name is Greek for setting opposite. An oxymoron goes one step further and fuses the opposites into a single expression.

Which term covers a phrase that says the same thing twice, such as free gift or small dwarfs?

Tautology repeats an idea in near-synonymous words, often by accident. Calling a dwarf small implies that giant dwarfs exist, and a giant dwarf would be an oxymoron.

Which epic poem by John Milton describes the flames of Hell as shedding not brightness but darkness visible?

Paradise Lost uses the phrase in Book 1, where Hell is a horrible dungeon whose fire gives off gloom instead of a glow. William Styron borrowed it for the title of his memoir of depression.

Which senator, Abraham Lincoln's rival in the 1858 debates, carried the oxymoronic nickname the Little Giant?

Stephen Douglas stood only five feet four but was a gifted speaker, and his contemporaries gave him the name. He kept his Senate seat in 1858, but Lincoln beat him to the presidency two years later.

Which king of England and Scotland, sponsor of the 1611 Bible, was dubbed the wisest fool in Christendom?

James I earned the label for being learned in small things yet foolish in weighty affairs. It is often credited to Henry IV of France, though the courtier Anthony Weldon may have coined it.

Which term describes a single word with two opposite meanings, such as cleave, which can mean cling or split?

Contronym is one name for such a word, and Janus word, after the two-faced Roman god, is another. Sanction is a classic case: it can mean to give approval or to impose a penalty.

Which oxymoronic phrase set the pace for school desegregation in the US Supreme Court's 1955 Brown II ruling?

All deliberate speed echoes a line in Francis Thompson's poem The Hound of Heaven. Critics found the wording too vague to force action, and many districts used it to put off integration for years.

Which Canadian media theorist coined the phrase global village in the 1960s for a world shrunk by electronic media?

Marshall McLuhan launched the phrase in The Gutenberg Galaxy in 1962 and returned to it in Understanding Media two years later. Richard Lederer classed it among his crafted oxymorons, coined on purpose for the clash.

Which Roman emperor, according to Suetonius, was fond of the oxymoron festina lente, or make haste slowly?

Augustus deplored rashness in a commander, and gold coins minted for him paired a crab with a butterfly as an emblem of the saying. Titus and the Medici later took it as a motto too.

Which 18th-century poet gave English the oxymoronic phrase damn with faint praise in his Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot?

Alexander Pope coined it in a poem of 419 lines, and the phrase has been repeated so often since that it is now a cliché. The same poem gave English the image of breaking a butterfly on a wheel.

The word oxymoron is itself an oxymoron; which term describes a word that has the property it names?

Autological words describe themselves: the word English is English, and pentasyllabic has five syllables. Oxymoron qualifies because its two Greek halves contradict each other.

Which oxymoronic policy did Daniel Patrick Moynihan urge on President Nixon as a pause in heated talk on race?

Benign neglect came from a memo arguing that race had been too much talked about, and that progress should continue while the rhetoric faded. It was meant to ease tensions after the civil rights era.

Which contradictory-sounding name do parliaments like Britain's and Canada's give the parties outside government?

Loyal opposition means the parties may fight the cabinet of the day while staying faithful to the Crown or the constitution. The phrase grew out of a joke John Hobhouse made in the Commons in 1826.

Which economist popularized the oxymoron creative destruction for the way new innovations make older ones obsolete?

Joseph Schumpeter drew the idea from the work of Karl Marx and turned it into a theory of innovation and the business cycle. The process is sometimes called Schumpeter's gale.

Which Irish poet paired terrible with beauty in the refrain of his poem on the Easter Rising of 1916?

WB Yeats usually rejected violence as a road to Irish independence, so the swift execution of the rising's leaders came as a shock. He used the poem, Easter, 1916, to work through his feelings.