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THE JOURNEY AND TOPICS OF INTEREST

a store named oxymoron (!)

11/28/2015

 
Today’s post is inspired by a store that I saw about a month ago.  I was on my way to a social media workshop when I passed a store with a really cool name.  It was called Oxymoron, and when I saw it, I knew that I wanted to blog about it.  So I decided to contact the store owner and make sure that she was okay with me mentioning the store.  I’m never sure of the legal protocol of things like this, so I just do my best to cover the bases.  She said it was just fine to mention her antique store, which was inspired by the phrase, “What’s old is new.”  This phrase is an oxymoron, hence the purpose of this post/lesson.

Let’s take a gander and learn what an oxymoron is.  It has quite the unique name.  Really, what terms do you know that not only have an –xy pair but also an “o” and the term “moron”.  Such a strange looking word.  Etymologically speaking though, it takes its origin from the Greek terms “oxy” meaning “sharp” and “moros” meaning “foolish”.  Put that together and you get “sharp-foolish”, basically an oxymoron in itself (I mean, how can you be both simultaneously?).  So the definition is when terms placed together are contradictory.

Examples include:  dark light, jumbo shrimp, the sound of silence, passive aggressive, guest host, larger half, living dead, magic realism (we'll have to delve into this one later), original copy, student teacher

 I would like to visit Oxymoron and support them because they brought, in my opinion (imo), a little more magic to the idea of antiquing.  This is brief interlude before I start a series of posts that I’ve been planning for about a week now.  I just needed to get this one out since I’d been wanting to post about oxymorons for a while now.  There’s so many terms I want to define, just to clarify for myself too.  Others on my list include “paradox” and “satire”.  I also like “archetype” and “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”.  Just kidding for this last one, although my brother asked me to spell it once. 

C’est tout.  That’s all.

Until next time...

Binna

Sources: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=oxymoron

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