<link href="css/hmh.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/> <meta content="urn:uuid:6b1eaa74-4469-4a85-b17e-640305979075" name="Adept.expected.resource"/> </head> <body> <h1 class="chaptertitle ">Conciliatory oxymorons</h1> <p class="left ">Only a few years ago, when using the word “oxymoron” one had to explain what it meant. People would cite well-known examples such as “parallel convergences,” and explain that an oxymoron is created when two contradictory words are put together, such as “strong weakness,” “desperate hope,” “gentle violence,” “senseless meaning,” and in Latin, <em>formosa deformitas, concordia discors,</em> and <em>festina lente.</em></p> <p class="follow">Now oxymorons are all the rage. They’re often found in the press, and I’ve heard politicians talk about them on television. Either everyone’s been reading treatises on rhetoric or there’s something oxymoronic going around. It could be argued that this is not symptomatic of anything. Linguistic fashions are continually developing through laziness and imitation. Some last a morning, others survive longer. Young people in the 1950s used to say “beastly,” and more recently “absurd,” without referring in any way to zoology or Ionesco. “Wait a minute” became “wait a sec,” though not because time had actually shortened; or people would say “exactly” rather than “I do” (even when they got married in church), not through any concern for mathematical accuracy but from the influence of television quiz shows.</p> <p class="follow">I suspect, though, that the oxymoron has become more popular because we live in a world that has seen the disappearance of ideologies that sought, at times ineptly, to reduce contradiction and impose an unambiguous view of things. Debates are held from contradictory positions. If you want a glaring example, we have Virtual Reality, which is rather like Concrete Nothing. Then there are Intelligent Bombs, which appears not to be an oxymoron, though it is when we consider that a bomb, by its very nature, is stupid and ought to fall where it’s thrown—otherwise, if it does what it pleases, it risks becoming Friendly Fire, a magnificent oxymoron, if by fire we mean something brought about to harm someone who is not a friend. The Exportation of Freedom seems fairly oxymoronic, if freedom is by definition something that a population or a group earns through personal determination and not through imposition by others. If we think about it, there’s also an implicit oxymoron in Conflict of Interests, since it can be interpreted as Private Interest Pursued for the Public Good, or Common Interest Pursued for Particular Personal Advantage.</p> <p class="follow">I’d like to point out that the Global Mobilization of the Antiglobal Movement is oxymoronic, as are the Peace Army and Humanitarian Intervention, if intervention means, as it does, a series of warlike activities in someone else’s country. I see more of them closer to home, judging from the electoral program of a Fascist Left, and I think Clerical Atheists are fairly oxymoronic. I wouldn’t exclude expressions that we’ve become quite familiar with, such as Artificial Intelligence and Electronic Brain, if the brain is something soft within our skull, and don’t forget Embryos with Souls. Likewise, to remain bipartisan, I think a proposal put forward by the center-left for Compulsory Community Service Volunteers is just as oxymoronic.</p> <p class="follow">In short, when people can no longer make sense of ideas that are incompatible, they resort to Conciliatory Oxymorons to give the impression that what cannot coexist coexists—the peace mission in Iraq, the Italian laws against the judiciary, politics on television and farces in the chambers of parliament, the banning of unauthorized satire, retrospective prophecies such as the third secret of Fátima, Arab kamikazes, former student activists of the 1960s who work for Berlusconi, liberal populism. And lastly, same-sex marriage virtuously opposed by cohabiting divorcées.</p> <p class="right ">2006</p> </body> </html>