Editorial
Front Page - Friday, March 19, 2010
I Swear
Oxymorons revisited
Vic Fleming
For two weeks, we have been reexamining oxymora, with the help of author Richard Lederer, who has written extensively on this and other humorous matters of language.
Last week, we looked at single-word oxymora, such as preposterous, sophomore, firewater and speechwriting.
This week, we want to focus on “natural” orymora, and then speculate on how punny oxymora came about.
Lederer postulates that most people who speak English and know the definition of an oxymoron would easily identify the following as such: student teacher, working vacation, small fortune.
He and I call these examples “natural” – he for one essential reason, I for another. But the point is that perceiving the incongruity in these pairs of words is a no-brainer. Plus, these phrases have found their way into the language and are used so fluidly that no emphasis is placed on the fact that there is humor lurking.
In a nutshell, we miss the incongruity if we are not careful.
Among numerous others that could be listed are: heavy light, live on tape, original copy, fresh frozen, old girl, random order, pretty ugly, plastic glass, still moving, deafening silence, awfully nice, and rolling stop.
And then there is another grouping with numerous – yea, I might say innumerable-examples. This group is labeled (by me) as the “punny” oxymorons (by Lederer as “punning oxymora”).
And everyone who has a list of oxymorons of any sort has the leading entry of this group: jumbo shrimp, with which I’d like to spend a moment.
George Carlin’s citation of jumbo shrimp as a contradiction in terms, in a comedic monologue in the ‘60s, is the point from which many scholars measure public awareness of the whole oxymoron thing.
For reasons having to do with his overall zaniness and the way in which he pointed out and highlighted incongruity, George Carlin got a huge laugh every time he said, “Jumbo shrimp.” He got a similar laugh when he said, “Military intelligence.”
But neither of those is a true oxymoron. Shrimp did not originally mean small. Even now, it does not mean small in the sense that jumbo means large.
Shrimp was a small fish, but it did not have the connotation of being small until people started calling other creatures, including especially other people, shrimps.
So, part of the incongruity involved in jumbo shrimp involves a trip through phases of meaning. I say that jumbo shrimp is the punch line in a short joke, the effect of which is to call that phrase an oxymoron, when it really isn’t,
Ditto with military intelligence. Ditto with numerous other examples, as to which the best that can really be said is that they are phrases in which one of the words or concepts tends to interpret ultimately to something incongruent or incompatible with the other.
E.g., holy war, working vacation, true story, free love, fuzzy math, simply confusing, clearly confused, black light, etc.
Last but not least, for my gig on the topic, are the situational oxymorons, where something more than a mere two-concept phrase must be set forth. These include the notion of parking in a driveway, driving on a parkway; sitting in the stands, standing on a sidewalk, fasting for days, and on and on.
I hope this has been helpful.
Vic Fleming is a district court judge in Little Rock, Ark., where he also teaches at the William H. Bowen School of Law. Contact him at judgevic@comcast.net.
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