- 1矛盾修飾法、矛盾語（兩個意思相反的詞故意放在一起）
An oxymoron is when a speaker puts two words together that seem to fight each other, on purpose, so the clash itself says something. “Deafening silence” is a classic one: silence cannot shout, and yet a room can feel loudly quiet. “Bittersweet,” “living dead,” “cruel kindness,” “ shrimp” work the same way. The speaker is not confused. The spark is the point. People also use oxymoron more loosely, though actually, to laugh at a pairing they find silly or fake — calling something an oxymoron as a jab. That looser use is common in talk and online, but in a language class the careful meaning is the deliberate two-word clash. It is a little school-formal, from writing and speech class, but newspapers use it too. The old Greek pieces already mean “sharp-dull,” so the name is doing the same trick it names.
組成From Ancient Greek oxús, “sharp, keen,” plus mōrós, “dull, foolish.” The Greek already meant “sharp-dull.” English took it through Latin oxymōrum / oxymōrus; the English noun is first seen in the 1600s. The exact Greek compound form is not found in the old Greek texts we still have.
原始詞典資料2 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
oxymoronnoun/ɒksɪˈmɔːɹɒn/
- 1
A figure of speech in which two words or phrases with opposing meanings are used together intentionally for effect.
- In Oxymoron jarring phrases join And terms opposed in harmony combine.
- For Theodor Adorno and his colleagues at the Frankfurt School who coined the term, "culture industry" was an oxymoron, intended to set up a critical contrast between the exploitative, repetitive mode of industrial mass production under capitalism and the associations of transformative power and aesthetico-moral transcendence that the concept of culture carried in the 1940s, when it still meant "high" culture.
- 2
A contradiction in terms.
- During the past few years, some 200 class-action suits have been filed against food manufacturers, charging them with misuse of the adjective in marketing such edible oxymorons as “natural” Cheetos Puffs, “all-natural” Sun Chips, “all-natural” Naked Juice, “100 percent all-natural” Tyson chicken nuggets and so forth.
- “Stable inflation is an oxymoron because it means it’s not stable,” Shelton told CNN in a recent interview.
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。