oxymoron

plural oxymorons · plural oxymora

1. rhetoricA figure of speech in which two words or phrases with opposing meanings are used together intentionally for effect.

   In Oxymoron jarring phrases join And terms opposed in harmony combine.

   1835, L[arret] Langley, “[Rhetorical Figures.] Oxymoron.”, in A Manual of the Figures of Rhetoric, […], Doncaster, South Yorkshire: […] C. White, […], →OCLC, page 35

   1 more example

   For Theodor Adorno and his colleagues at the Frankfurt School who coined the term, "culture industry" was an oxymoron, intended to set up a critical contrast between the exploitative, repetitive mode of industrial mass production under capitalism and the associations of transformative power and aesthetico-moral transcendence that the concept of culture carried in the 1940s, when it still meant "high" culture.

   1996, John Sinclair, “Culture and Trade: Some Theoretical and Practical Considerations”, in Emile G. McAnany, Kenton T. Wilkinson, editors, Mass Media and Free Trade: NAFTA and the Cultural Industries, University of Texas Press

2. broadlyproscribedsometimesA contradiction in terms.

   “Stable inflation is an oxymoron because it means it’s not stable,” Shelton told CNN in a recent interview.

   2024 October 31, Matt Egan, “Trump’s former pick to join the Federal Reserve has proposed a radical solution to solve inflation”, in CNN Business, archived from the original on 09 Dec 2024

   2 more examples

   During the past few years, some 200 class-action suits have been filed against food manufacturers, charging them with misuse of the adjective in marketing such edible oxymorons as “natural” Cheetos Puffs, “all-natural” Sun Chips, “all-natural” Naked Juice, “100 percent all-natural” Tyson chicken nuggets and so forth.

   2015 April 28, Michael Pollan, “Why ‘Natural’ Doesn’t Mean Anything Anymore”, in The New York Times Magazine, archived from the original on 08 Nov 2020

   The oxymoron is a common type of wordplay that, frankly, isn’t all that amusing or challenging to identify, unless of course one stumbles upon oxymora involving the word oxymoron, such as oxymoronic pleonasm or pleonastic oxymoron (a pleonasm is a linguistic redundancy like burning fire).

   2015 May 15, Adam Lewis, “As a grammarian contrarian, I love opposites. But what about alternyms?”, in The Guardian, archived from the original on 23 Feb 2016