15 The neighborhood objected to his plans.
Neighborhood= ‗the people in the neighborhood‘ 16
The whole town turned out to welcome us. Whole town= ‗all the people living in the town‘
17 I enjoy Shakespeare immensely.
Shakespeare= ‗the works of Shakespeare‘ 18
That sounds like early Beethoven. early Beethoven= ‘the early works of Beethoven‘
19 Nothing like it has happened since Napoleon.
Napoleon= ‗the time of Napoleon‘, ‗the time when napoleon lived‘
20 After the bomb, nothing could be the same again.
The bomb= ‗the invention of the bomb‘
2.2.2.8. Oxymoron
An
oxymoron plural
:
oxymora
is a figure of speech that combines two opposing or contradictory ideas. Oxymoron appears in a variety of
contexts, including inadvertent errors such as
ground pilot
and literary oxymoron crafted to reveal a paradox. The most common form of oxymoron
involves an adjective-noun combination of two words. Leech 1969:132
states ―Oxymoron is the yoking together of two expressions which are semantically incompatible, so that in combination they
can have no conceivable literal reference to reality.‖ Example:
One case where many oxymora are strung together can be found in Shakespeares
Romeo and Juliet
, where Romeo declares: 21
―O heavy lightness Serious vanity
Mis-shapen chaos of well-seeming forms Feather of lead,
bright smoke
,
cold fire
,
sick health
‖ Here is the example taken from ―A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry‖
by Geoffrey Leech 1969: 141-142: 22
Party in such
sweet sorrow
. Romeo and Juliet II.ii 23
Thou art to me a
delicious torment
. Emerson, ‗Friendship‘, Essays
24 To
live a life half-died, a
living death
. Milton, Samson Agonistes
25 And love‘s the
noblest frailty
of the mind. Dryden, The Indian Emperror, II.ii
Example 20 and 21 testify the humanity‘s ability to experience pleasure mingled with pain: a type of apparent absurdity which has classical
precedent of Catullus well- known paradox ‗Odi et amo‘ ‗I hate and I love.
We probably interpret them as ‗a mixture of sweetness and sorrow‘, ‗a mixture of delight
and torment‘, although it could be argued that it is a mysterious merging of contrary emotions that is imaginatively realized in
such expressions rather than their coexistence. Milton‘s oxymoron 22 ‗a living death‘, referring to Samson‘s
blindness, can be resolved by construing
death
, by metaphorical extension as ‗a condition which seems like death‘.
Dryden‘s ‗noblest frailty‘ 23 is not so much a logical absurdity as a contradiction of accepted values. Nobility is associated with strength, and
ignobilit y with weakness. Hence ‗noblest frailty‘ argues a reassessment of
our moral assumptions, by telling us that nobility and weakness are
