Editorial
Front Page - Friday, March 12, 2010
I Swear...
Oxymorons revisited
Vic Fleming
Part 2
Last week, we began a revisitation to the world of words, phrases and concepts that are seemingly self-contradictory. The community of oxymorons or, as Richard Lederer insists on calling them, oxymora.
At a site called fun-with-words.com, I found an article by Lederer, whom I have been alluding to since at least 1987, when his first book, “Anguished English,” was published. Lederer has gone on to publish many more books, virtually all of them involving simple fun with our complex language.
Regardless of how dangerous it may be to let you in on this, I insist that you know the whole truth: This business of merging and melding incongruous words to make new words is older than the proverbial hills.
The word “sophomore” is made up of two words that, side by side, would otherwise read “wise fool.” Remember that next time you’re inclined to accuse someone of acting sophomoric.
If you look at the common word “preposterous,” and study it for a second or two, you might see a similar situation. Note “pre,” which means before and “post,” which means after.
“Pianoforte,” which you probably don’t speak of as often as you do preposterous sophomores, is a combo of “soft-loud.”
Lederer characterizes the above examples as “single-word oxymora composed of dependent morphemes.” He does this primarily, I think, to distinguish them from another grouping of one-word contradictions – those composed of independent morphemes.
To illustrate the latter, Lederer lists “spendthrift, bridegroom, bittersweet, ballpoint, speechwriting, firewater and someone.”
A “morpheme,” by the way, is “a distinctive collocation of phonemes … having no smaller meaningful parts.” Merriam-Webster.com.
A phoneme is “any of the abstract units of the phonetic system of a language that correspond to a set of similar speech sounds … which are perceived to be a single distinctive sound in the language.”
According to my puzzle databases, morpheme has appeared only once in a mainstream crossword puzzle in the past 10 years. Phoneme, meanwhile, has made 12 appearances, although a third of these clue it as the phrase “Phone me.”
In essence, a morpheme is a grammatical unit as to which there is meaning and as to which there are no subparts thereof that have meaning.
A phoneme is a speech unit involving sound, such as “sh,” “th,” or any of the various sounds made by a single letter (hard g, soft g, etc.).
Are we having fun yet?
Join us next week, when we will ask whether “jumbo shrimp” really is an oxymoron.
Vic Fleming is a district court judge in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he also teaches at the William H. Bowen School of Law. Contact him at judgevic@comcast.net.
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