A few years ago I was having dinner with my friends Cathy and Jim Giles and had some reason for calling attention to “military intelligence,” which I referred to as an oxymoron. Gently, Cathy reprimanded and corrected me. The expression is not an oxymoron, after all. She explained why it isn’t, and she was perfectly right. I have thought back to that evening several times and now, finally, have decided to share with readers the benefit of that lesson.

An oxymoron is the deliberate joining of contradictory ideas. Wikipedia offers these examples:

a living death – sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind
a deafening silence – bitter-sweet – the bigger half
The Sounds of Silence (song title)
make haste slowly – he was conspicuous by his absence

But sometimes all we have is a funny collocation of terms – a joining of ideas that makes us smile in that it suggests incongruity.

friendly fire – airline food [army food, cafeteria food, etc.] – American culture – Apple tech support – mature male
athletic scholarship – California culture – classic rock and roll – civil strife
Just war [and civilized warfare] – Microsoft security – and the classic, example, military intelligence [and Central Intelligence Agency] – compassionate Conservative

The word “oxymoron” derives from the Greek Oxus = “sharp”, Moros = “dull” . Knowing that will put you one up on most professors and, for that reason, is worth knowing.

You can find a great collection of pseudo-oxymorons by CLICKING HERE. In among them are genuine oxymorons. Finding others is a lot more fun than finding pseudo-intellectual palindromes. These exist only to give you headaches and to prove to you that the people who discover them are smarter than you are.

And remember this: There is only one thing in life you need to remember to make your life worth living.