Oxymoron

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Thu, 24 Mar 2005 09:31:46 -0500, Page Stephens <hpst at EARTHLINK.NET> wrote:

>OXYMORON:
>"A rhetorical figure in which an epigrammatic effect is created by the
>conjunction of incongruous or contradictory terms"
>
>Can anyone out there tell me when oxymoron lost its technical rhetorical
>definition and became merely a synonym for a contradiction in terms?
>
>For better or worse the former usage is apparently lost forever having been
>overwhelmed by the popular usage to the point where no one except a
>professor of English or someone like myself who took English back in the
>middle ages would even know that it ever was a technical term.

The latest OED draft entry has cites back to 1902 for the general sense of
'a contradiction in terms', but a quick look at Newspaperarchive suggests
that this sense wasn't popularized until the mid-'70s.


--Ben Zimmer