The Old News About the Oxymoron

Oxymoron, a Greek term combining the words for “sharp” and “foolish,” has been adopted in English to refer to inadvertently contradictory or incongruous mash-ups of terms such as “military intelligence” and “jumbo shrimp” — a class known as subjective oxymora (that latter word is the pedantic-looking plural) because they are not literally at odds with each other.

However, the original connotation is of an evocative paradox deliberately framed by a writer — an objective oxymoron. One of the most well-known examples is William Shakespeare’s line “Parting is such sweet sorrow,” fromRomeo and Juliet, in which Juliet exults in the bittersweet anguish generated by the lovers’ separation. Shakespeare provided a short list of literary oxymora in this earlier passage from the same speech:

“O heavy lightness! Serious vanity!
Mis-shapen chaos of well-seeming forms!
Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health!”

The Bard employed oxymora on other occasions, including in Hamlet (“I must be cruel, only to be kind”), in Julius Caesar (“fearful bravery”), and in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (“A tedious brief scene . . . very tragical mirth”). Likewise, John Donne wrote of “beggarly riches,” Herman Melville of “a careful disorderliness,” John Milton of “darkness visible,” and Alexander Pope of a “bookful blockhead,” and Lord Tennyson ventured of his Lancelot that “faith unfaithful kept him falsely true.”

Classic authors do not have a monopoly on oxymora, though; contemporary coinages are often more than subjective punch lines like “responsible government.” Here are some other recent examples that might inspire you to convey original ideas in phrases that are more than the sum of their parts:

• alone together: said, perhaps, of two people that share a physical space but are emotionally isolated from each other
• cheerful pessimism: a description of a person who blithely notices and remarks on the dark cloud behind every silver lining
• eloquent silence: a lack of response from someone that nevertheless clearly conveys that person’s attitude
• hellish paradise: an environment designed to make inhabitants or visitors feel bliss but is, to the more perceptive among them, unnerving in its illusory promise
• sad smile: a mild expression of superficial cheer that does not mask melancholy or sorrow
• sublimely awful: a reference to something that is so bad, it arouses ironic delight
• wise fool: a person of supposed mental weakness more shrewd than he or she seems at first

The Story Behind Words for Hair Color

The conventions for referring to hair color are tousled. Why is it that we refer to someone with light-colored hair as a blonde (and, rarely, a blond) but we call someone with red hair a redhead? Why are blonde andbrunette spelled two ways?

Blond and its feminine formblonde, both from the Latin wordblundus (“yellow”) by way of French, may have in turn come from a Frankish word that could be related to Old English blondan, “to mix,” which shares its origins with blend. Blond is usually employed as an adjective, the term as a noun for a man with blond hair, by contrast, is rare. Because blonds and blondes are more likely to be fair-skinned as well as fair-haired, the term is also associated with light complexion.

The presence of both masculine and feminine forms for blond/blonde andbrunet/brunette is due to their French (and ultimately Latin) roots, as it were, as opposed to the Germanic origins of black and red, the words for the other major hair colors, which have a neutral form.

Normally, English might have jettisoned one gendered form for blond/blonde. However, the venerable theme in popular culture of the blonde-haired woman as more sexually attractive and available (as well as flighty, shallow, and dimwitted), as compared to females with hair of another color, has caused the noun form blonde and brunette to endure.

The numerous terms for variations in blond hair, not necessarily in order of darkness, include sandy, strawberry, and dirty. Towhead (the first syllable refers to its resemblance to tow, flax or hemp fibers used for twine or yarn) describes a person with yellowish and often unruly hair.

Brunet and brunette, from the gender-specific diminutives of the French brun (“brown”), mean “brown haired.” (Brun and its diminutives originally also referred to a dark complexion.) As with blond and blonde, the male form is rarely used on its own as a noun, though the masculine and feminine variations persist probably because of the same double standard in association of hair color with female sexuality and with personality characteristics as mentioned in reference to blondes above. (Dark-haired women are stereotyped as serious, sophisticated, and capable.) Words for shades of brown hair, from darkest to lightest, are brunet/brunette, chestnut, walnut (the last two as compared to colors of the respective nuts), golden, and ash.

Redhead is yet another term for hair color used as a noun; in contrast to the colors mentioned above, it is not gender specific, though as blonde andbrunette are much more common in usage than blond and brunet, it is more likely to refer to a woman than a man.

Variations in red hair, listed in alphabetical order rather than according to depth of color, include auburn, copper, ginger, and orange. (Auburn derives ultimately from the Latin word albus, meaning “white,” but thanks to the influence of brun, the French spelling — auborne — changed, as did the meaning, to “reddish brown.”) The prevailing — and long-standing — cultural stereotype about redheads is that they are hot tempered; the hair color has also been associated with a high libido.

Alone among descriptions of people with general hair tones, a black-haired person is never referred to by the word black alone.

Hair-color categories are arbitrary — strawberry blond is sometimes considered a type of red hair, and auburn might be classified as a type of brown hair — though a system called the Fischer-Saller scale, devised for anthropological and medical classification, assigns alphabetical letters and roman numerals to various grades of hair color.

10 Varieties of Linguistic Siamese Twins

One of the most intriguing aspects of idiomatic phrases is their fixed nature, an aspect acknowledged in two terms for the class of idioms distinguished by the use of the conjunctionand or the conjunction orbetween the constituent words: irreversible binomials and freezes. (They are also referred to as binomials or binomial pairs, or are identified by the colloquial expression “Siamese twins.”)

Ten sometimes overlapping variations of linguistic Siamese twins (which, because they are often clichés, should be used with caution) follow, including a category for triplets:

1. Binomials connected with and include “alive and well,” “nuts and bolts,” and “skin and bone.”

2. Binomials connected with or include “give or take,” “more or less,” and “win or lose.”

3. Binomials connected with other words include “dawn till dusk,” “front to back,” “head over heels.”

4. Binomials that contain opposites or antonyms include “days and nights,” “high or low,” and “up and down.”

5. Binomials that contain related words or synonyms include “house and home,” “leaps and bounds,” and “prim and proper.”

6. Binomials that contain alliteration include “friend or foe,” “rant and rave,” and “tried and true.”

7. Binomials that contain numbers include “four or five” — note that the linguistic convention is to always state the lower number first (a figurative idiom is this category is “at sixes and sevens,” meaning “in a confused state”)

8. Binomials that contain similar-sounding words: “doom and gloom,” “out and about,” and “wear and tear.” This category includes rhyming slang, in which a word or phrase is slang code for a word that rhymes with the second binomial term in the phrase (even though only the first binomial term may constitute the slang) and is either random, as in minces, from “mince pies,” for eyes, or suggestive, as in trouble, from “trouble and strife,” for wife.

9. Binomials that contain exact or near repetition include “dog eat dog,” “kill or be killed,” or “neck and neck.”

10. Trinomials, which contain three terms, include “blood, sweat, and tears,” “left, right, and center,” and “win, lose, and draw.”

Take care, when using these clichés, to reproduce them correctly (unless you are deliberately — and obviously — distorting them for emphatic or humorous effect, as when referring to fashionably ripped jeans as “tear and wear”) so that erroneous usage does not have a negative impact on your overall message.

Should You Angle for Anglo-Saxon, or Enlighten with Latin?

Arguments for and against favoring Latinate words over Germanic ones, or vice versa (or, if you prefer a non-Latinate phrase, the other way around), have been heard over the years. What’s best? How about the status quo?

The vocabulary of Modern English is the result of a unique admixture of words (and phrases) from a variety of languages. But only about one-fourth derive directly from Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, and other Germanic languages. More than that come from Latin — and Latin’s progeny (mostly Spanish and French) account for as many more words. Admittedly, many Latin words are used primarily in legal, scientific, and medical contexts, whereas Germanic words tend to be more practical for everyday life, but the Latinate contribution is still predominant over native words, and the language is richer for the widespread borrowings.

Given the choice between words from the Germanic root and those of Latin origin, which should one choose? How about one or the other, on an ad hoc basis, or as your mood strikes you? Various movements have attempted to eradicate non-Germanic vocabulary from the English word-hoard, or at least minimize it, but these absurd endeavors, which have sometimes included efforts to create or calque (translate) new words, have been prompted by nationalism, not by any sensible motive.

To communicate plainly, Germanic words, which tend to be shorter, are often preferable, but the Latinate pain, for example, is as simple as the Germanicache, and Germanic anger and wrath are slightly more complicated than ireand rage, both of which are of Latin provenance but could easily be misidentified as Germanic words.

If you do want to introduce more Germanic words into your writing, it’s easy, for instance, to target classes of words with specific suffixes: For example, words that end in the Latinate suffix -age have more concise synonyms: Think of advantage (gain), marriage (wedlock), savage (wild), and voyage (trip). But where would we be without parentage? “Mother and father” may be more concrete, but the Latinate term is more concise, more precise, and more flexible when it comes to nontraditional families.

For another example, words ending in -ity are often more complicated; why not, for example, write selfhood instead of identity? Unfortunately, identityoften refers to a collective, rather than individual, impression. (And often, when one considers alternatives for Latinate words, the first synonym that comes to mind is non-Germanic, too: Quick, what’s another word for fidelity?Loyalty? That’s from French. Allegiance? French.) For yet another example, though words ending in -ology are of Latin origin, there’s no suitable Germanic equivalent for the suffix.

Ultimately, word choice depends on various factors, but the ground a word sprang up in shouldn’t be one of them.