Talk:Oxymoron

I removed "jumbo shrimp" and the comments someone added because this comes down to a US vs British usage dispute. A scan of american dictionaries indicates that they deem "Shrimp" meaning "small" to be informal. A scan of British disctionaries indicates that "shrimp" meaning small is the primary usage, and the usage as a crustacean is a secondary one. Hence it IS an oxymoron to half the English speaking world, and is perfectly sensible to the other half. Rather than get into a protracted and longwinded explanation of trans-atlantic/pacific English issues, it was easier to simply remove it, as losing it doesn't hurt the article at all.

well, *I* think of 'jumbo shrimp' as faintly humorous, and I'm an American. --MichaelTinkler

(I'm American). Whenever someone tells me they're a student teacher, I ask them if they like jumbo shrimp or if they used to work for military intelligence. --justfred

Are you sure this article isn't just a long stub? --The Epopt, defender of large crustaceans

If you don't like the article, rewrite your own damn version, that's what the 'pedia is for. Quit whining about it here. - MMGB

Er, I think you'll find a long stub is an oxymoronic joke, Manning... sjc

Yeah, possibly, but I get so steamed when people write "this article is no good" comments in Talk sections, I'd rather they either improve it, give suggestions for improving it or shut the hell up. And I'm having a bad-sense-of-humour day, so maybe I'm being a weeny bit too terse. And another things, I really hate it when people put in opinions as facts. The plural of "oxymoron" is "oxymora". I checked 6 different dictionaries. Just because something thinks it should be "oxymorons" doesn't make it so. (later - OK, 1 dictionary gives "oxymorons" as an alternate.. The others (OED. Websters etc) only give oxymora)- MMGB

Where in the OED did you find oxymora? Has it been added in the new electronic edition? It's not in the old (20th century) printed edition at all. Dandrake 08:10, Jul 7, 2004 (UTC)

Actually, I find American Heritage to be usually the best dictionary made for matters of usage, second only to OED. "Webster's" doesn't specify any particular dictionary because it isn't a trademark, but the one's made by Merriam-Webster company tend to be wimpily descriptivist. As you point out, though, even AH prefers the Latin plural. --LDC (For the record, I think it's actually the Greek plural, since Latin words don't do that.)

The plural which people used in the article is oxymorons, which is why I tidied it up to reflect reality. I agree that the plural of oxymorons is oxymora. But 99 times out of a hundred if you ever see the plural written down it will be written oxymorons by people otherwise intelligent enough to get their heads around the concept. sjc

Thank you, sjc, for getting my joke. Perhaps I need to use a less subtle sledgehammer.... And, Manning, please get your sense of humor repaired. I'm by no means the most prolific encyclopedist here, but I have written some fairly hefty articles and contributed significantly to others. I think I've earned the right to comment, even when I fail to be humorous. --The Epopt

Epopt - unconditional apology offered. Frankly, there are days when you just shouldn't log on - yesterday was one of them. Regards - MMGB

Wow! You are obviously a gentleman as well as a scholar, Manning -- accepted without reservation. Don't give up on proper plurals, though! (I would humorously suggest "oxymononi" if I weren't afraid that sooner or later a humor-impared Mormon would see it and take offence. So I won't.) --The Epopt

"Oxymorons" isn't incorrect, according to both Merriam-Webster and the American Heritage Dictionary. I'm trying to think of any oxymoronic way of saying "less preferred" instead of "incorrectly."

According to [1] (http://www.oxymoronica.com/oxymoralist.shtml):

"When you have more than one oxymoron, what do you call them? The typical answer, of course, is oxymorons. But, technically, that would be wrong. The correct plural form of the word is oxymora. Over the years, however, so many people have been saying oxymorons that--even though technically incorrect--the term is so widespread that it's now considered an acceptable usage by most language scholars. If you want to be precise, oxymora is the word to use." -Wins oddf 03:25, Dec 21, 2004 (UTC)

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Fowler, writing 75 years ago and in a much more pedantic time, gives oxymorons as the first plural and oxymora as the second. In his article on the ending -ON, he notes that for some words with that ending, phenomenon, criterion, oxymoron, and several obscure terms, "some may and often do" form the plural in -a, while many other words similarly formed, skeleton, electron, lexicon are never pluralized thus. It seems a coin toss to me, but actually, until I looked it up, I had never heard the -a plural and oxymora reads pretty pedantic to me. Ortolan88

You're not the only one. A pedant so well educated that he doesn't need to look in the OED recently zapped "oxymorons" with the comment that that is not a word. Actually, it's the only plural for oxymoron that I found in the OED, appearing in a citation fron 1677. Let me emphasize that "oxymora" has no later citation, nor any at all. "Teeth" and "aquaria" appear explicitly as plurals in OED entries because they are not formed by regular English rules; "oxymora" does not. Of course, I'd never say that oxymora isn't a word, because that's a generally dopey thing to say; but in the 20th century it was very far from being the recognized plural.

Actually, from the nearly All-American cast of dictionary citations above, I wonder if "oxymora" is another bit of American—what shall we call it? defensive pedantry? overcompensating pedantry?—rather like N. Webster's notion that "kilometer" should be stressed on the antepenultimate syllable, or the antepenult. (My country: May she always be right, but—when she isn't we'll set her straight.)Dandrake 08:10, Jul 7, 2004 (UTC)

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It looks like the forces of language mutation are continuing their inexorable progress. When I added a link here from my new article, Organic salt (in which I contribute to this mutation), I reviewed Merriam-Webster Online and American Heritage (2000, via Bartleby.com) and found that neither gave a clear preference for the original meaning of intentional absurdity. MWO doesn't even suggest it. American Heritage (also my favorite printed dictionary) calls it "a rhetorical figure", but a recursive lookup of rhetorical and rhetoric indicates a preference for rhetoric as a general style of speech and writing, with the "bombastic", "pretentious", "vacuous", "insincere", etc., meanings being pushed to second or third place. It might have helped to have a Greek word or neologism that provided the more general meaning, rather than relying on the cumbersome, less stylish "contradiction in terms". -- Jeff Q 08:31, 23 May 2004 (UTC)