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Word: oxymoron (lookup in dictionary) (lookup stats)
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...circumstances, bad information furnished by sly enemies, betrayal by subordinates or former friends"). Champion in this category is the well-known loser of the 1962 California gubernatorial race: "You won't have Nixon to kick around any more." Another master rhetorician, Spiro Agnew, has achieved signal results through oxymoron ("a figure designed to convey a truth by linking terms or phrases that are contradictory"). Example: "Protest is every citizen's right, but that does not ensure that every protest is right...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: The Nation: A Few Words About Rhetoric | 12/4/1972 | See Source »

...coincidence of Memorial Day and the commencement season has always had some poignancy-an oxymoron of the young war dead and a lively new generation emerging from the academy to begin its life's work. This year the rites at campus and cemetery have an especially intense significance...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: American Notes: Memorial and Commencement, 1970 | 6/8/1970 | See Source »

...Administration's ideal, says New Publius, is a "national localism." Such a notion, stated as a somewhat clumsy oxymoron, reopens the entire question of Federal power v. states' rights. For years, heirs of the New Deal have tended to dismiss states'-righters as rednecked Smerdyakovs. Shortly after New Publius circulated his paper, another White House speechwriter, Tom Charles Huston, 28, a former president...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Nation: Goto v. Publius in the White House | 2/23/1970 | See Source »

...would have to adopt an entirely new form of discipline, one in which conformity would be secondary to personal initiative and common sense. Whether such a posture would be militarily effective is a question for the psychologists, but I suspect that "volunteer army" will remain a politician's oxymoron for some time to come...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Letters: Jan. 24, 1969 | 1/24/1969 | See Source »

Illusive Meaning. In his own mischievous and amiable way, Barth is seeking what has been called "the coincidence of apposites," those meanings that are beyond the ability of value-burdened words to express fully. Sometimes an illusive meaning can be momentarily grasped with an oxymoron-the joining of two mutually contradictory words. Barth's "printed voice" belongs in this category, along with Capote's "nonfiction novel" and Detroit's "hardtop convertible." Clearly-or un-clearly-Lost in the Funhouse is a work of highly significant irrelevance...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Books: Fables for People Who Can Hear with Their Eyes | 9/27/1968 | See Source »

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