Word: oxymoron
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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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
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...