macho man

[Yerkes, Susan]

Larry, Lynne et. al.

This is my first posting, and I have to say I am extremly intimidated --
please bear with me, y' all.

As as a resident in macholand (South Texas) I think I can say with certainty
that "macho man" is at best a hyponym.
Male man, on the other hand, would be a pleonasm under the definition Lynn
Murphy cites (as, less entertainingly, would be a phrase such as "the man he
said," which Webster's 9th New Collegiate cites).

Actually, the Spanish (or Tex-Mex) expression "macha" is used colloquially
these parts, both as a feminine adjective describing a masculine woman with
an appropriate noun, and as a freestanding noun substituting for the
complete phrase.  "Macho," too, crops up occasionally as a descriptive noun
for a "manly" man.

Is there any word for a phrase that is effectively a homonym for an
oxymoron, but is actually NOT one?
(e.g. "mail woman?")

Susan Gamble Yerkes


-----Original Message-----
From: Laurence Horn [mailto:laurence.horn at YALE.EDU]
Sent: Monday, February 11, 2002 10:51 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: Opposite of "oxymoron"


At 5:23 PM +0000 2/12/02, Lynne Murphy wrote:
>--On Tuesday, February 12, 2002 11:47 am -0500 Patti Kurtz
><pkurtz at HEIDELBERG.EDU> wrote:
>
>>Hi.  Some colleagues of mine in the English department are curious as to
>>whether a term exists for word pairs that are the opposite of oxymoron--
>>that is, instead of contradictory, they mean the  same thing but are used
>>together, like "puppy dog" and "kitty cat."
>
>Yes, it's a pleonasm.  (Or you could just call it 'redundant'.)  They're
>certainly not limited to baby-talk.
>
Maybe, but for most speakers "puppy dog" is not an example; "puppy"
is a hyponym of "dog", not a synonym.  (Cf. "collie dog", "tuna
fish".)  "Kitty cat" may be, along with "bunny rabbit", but it
depends on the details of the (child's) lexicon:  for some children,
only small cats may be kitties, and a jackrabbit may not qualify as a
bunny.  There's still redundancy, of course, but the redundancy has
to be defined in terms of hyponymy (proper inclusion) rather than
synonymy (equivalence).  Notice that in general these can't be
reversed (*a dog(gie) puppy/collie)

larry

P.S.  Is "macho man" another example?