By William Roger Jones
Bette Midler, the American singer-actress-comedian, once said, "I never know how much of what I say is true." The reason could be because she was voted "Most Talkative" back in her Honolulu high school. But it could also be because of spoken oxymorons.
An oxymoron is a rather foolish contradiction in terms that seems not to make sense. In other words, it is a combination of words used together wherein both cannot be true and correct by definition. We hear and use them all the time. The expressions can be a bit confusing to new learners of the English language.
The character Homer Smith (in William Barrett's novelette The Lilies of the Field) began teaching a bit of English to the German and Hungarian Catholic nuns. Sister Albertine sketched a picture of his vehicle and said, "Automobile? No? Autobus? No?"
"She knew that it had a special name and she did better with English than the others. They were all interested but when he told them that it was a station wagon, he drew blank looks. With a few deft strokes, the nun drew a depot, then a wagon. How could you put them together and obtain something that resembled an automobile?" Although Homer tried, he did not explain it well. Neither can I. I would even have more trouble with the British English equivalent "estate car."
There are well over a thousand of these expressions either to confuse or amuse you. Here are some examples. "Boxing ring": athletes usually box in a square enclosure. However, in organic chemistry diagrammatic structures such as triangle-shaped things like cyclopropane (a former anesthetic) and square-shaped things like squaric acid (used to make fluorescence dyes) and hexagon-shaped things like benzene (found in crude oil and is responsible for the aroma around gas stations) are referred to as rings.
The oxymoron "clear as mud" is not transparent. The meaning is that everyone knows what is soft, wet, dirt and thus, everyone should understand the point one is making. "Doing nothing": doing means movement of some sort and you are always doing something, even if it is only breathing. "Extra time": there are 24 hours in a day. Could I get 26 or 28, please? But we really know that it means to need or receive more time to do something. "Floating to the bottom": floating usually means staying on top of a liquid surface; whatever it is has to be sinking to the bottom, although, it may be sinking slowly. "Going nowhere": well, if you or it is going, most certainly movement takes place in a direction whether forward or backward. But, we all know it means that whatever it is, there is no progress. This reminds me of what an airplane pilot somewhere over the Pacific Ocean said, "I'm lost but I'm making record time!" Now, he was going nowhere real fast.
"Sound of silence": Simon and Garfunkel really popularized this one in their folk-rock song "The Sound of Silence." Although when you think about it, silence is just the absence of ambient audible sound heard or capable of being heard, or non-perceptible frequency/wavelength above the human ear's audibility sense. There is always sound. There is really never silence with the exception to one in deep outer space or one with profound hearing loss. This expression reminds me of what the English novelist Thomas Hardy once quipped, "That man's silence is wonderful to listen to."
Finally, perhaps you would like to consider these: "non-stop flight, one size fits all, paper tablecloth, plastic silverware, previous history, pure dirt, sanitary landfill, second best, sincere lie, slow jog, small fortune, thinking out loud, true story, valuable junk, and weekday." That's all folks, enough is enough, I promise to be quiet, not even a loud whisper or another peep out of me. Oh, I forgot, promises are made to be broken.
The author (wrjones@vsu.edu) teaches English as a second language and is a chemistry lab coordinator and research technician at Virginia State University.
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An oxymoron is a rather foolish contradiction in terms that seems not to make sense. In other words, it is a combination of words used together wherein both cannot be true and correct by definition. We hear and use them all the time. The expressions can be a bit confusing to new learners of the English language.
The character Homer Smith (in William Barrett's novelette The Lilies of the Field) began teaching a bit of English to the German and Hungarian Catholic nuns. Sister Albertine sketched a picture of his vehicle and said, "Automobile? No? Autobus? No?"
"She knew that it had a special name and she did better with English than the others. They were all interested but when he told them that it was a station wagon, he drew blank looks. With a few deft strokes, the nun drew a depot, then a wagon. How could you put them together and obtain something that resembled an automobile?" Although Homer tried, he did not explain it well. Neither can I. I would even have more trouble with the British English equivalent "estate car."
There are well over a thousand of these expressions either to confuse or amuse you. Here are some examples. "Boxing ring": athletes usually box in a square enclosure. However, in organic chemistry diagrammatic structures such as triangle-shaped things like cyclopropane (a former anesthetic) and square-shaped things like squaric acid (used to make fluorescence dyes) and hexagon-shaped things like benzene (found in crude oil and is responsible for the aroma around gas stations) are referred to as rings.
The oxymoron "clear as mud" is not transparent. The meaning is that everyone knows what is soft, wet, dirt and thus, everyone should understand the point one is making. "Doing nothing": doing means movement of some sort and you are always doing something, even if it is only breathing. "Extra time": there are 24 hours in a day. Could I get 26 or 28, please? But we really know that it means to need or receive more time to do something. "Floating to the bottom": floating usually means staying on top of a liquid surface; whatever it is has to be sinking to the bottom, although, it may be sinking slowly. "Going nowhere": well, if you or it is going, most certainly movement takes place in a direction whether forward or backward. But, we all know it means that whatever it is, there is no progress. This reminds me of what an airplane pilot somewhere over the Pacific Ocean said, "I'm lost but I'm making record time!" Now, he was going nowhere real fast.
"Sound of silence": Simon and Garfunkel really popularized this one in their folk-rock song "The Sound of Silence." Although when you think about it, silence is just the absence of ambient audible sound heard or capable of being heard, or non-perceptible frequency/wavelength above the human ear's audibility sense. There is always sound. There is really never silence with the exception to one in deep outer space or one with profound hearing loss. This expression reminds me of what the English novelist Thomas Hardy once quipped, "That man's silence is wonderful to listen to."
Finally, perhaps you would like to consider these: "non-stop flight, one size fits all, paper tablecloth, plastic silverware, previous history, pure dirt, sanitary landfill, second best, sincere lie, slow jog, small fortune, thinking out loud, true story, valuable junk, and weekday." That's all folks, enough is enough, I promise to be quiet, not even a loud whisper or another peep out of me. Oh, I forgot, promises are made to be broken.
The author (wrjones@vsu.edu) teaches English as a second language and is a chemistry lab coordinator and research technician at Virginia State University.
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