by Jack Stapleton, Jr.
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by Jack Stapleton, Jr.
Please feel free to join my latest campaign: to eradicate, hopefully into oblivion, the unending proliferation of oxymorons. This is a word Webster describes as “a figure of speech that uses seeming contradictions.” You may have already detected two of them in the opening sentence. If you failed to notice them you maybe farther down the road to addiction than you realize.
If you have been paying attention, however, you have no doubt noticed that commonly expressed ideas oftentimes have foolish, totally misstated titles. Phrases such as “campaign reform,” for example, have been a part of our American lexicon for decades. Each time it’s used, the phrase is meant to convey that improvements are a part of the package. If we’ve been reforming American campaigns, why is it we keep having more reforms with the passage of every election? We obviously didn’t reform campaigns the last time, and the odds are pretty good that whatever alternatives are being suggested at the moment will soon have to be reformed again. And again.
“World peace” is another one of those oxymoronic phrases that contains contradictory meanings. The world is hardly at peace. It hasn’t been since the Adam and Eve era, even after we’ve fought worldwide wars to bring it about. Politicians delight in promising us world peace, when they really mean that they’re prepared to wage war to make it happen, hardly the acceptable protocol for turning lions into lambs. An adjunctive phrase, “peace in the Middle East,” is simply a glaring example of the oxymoronishness of modern-day life. The Associated Press recently noted that, at this moment of “world peace” 18 nations are currently at war somewhere around the world, which pretty well invalidates the phrase. Incidentally, the AP also states that, currently, there are seven armed rebellions against existing governments, so not all of us are blessed with peace, even at home.
One of the most obvious oxymorons in America today is “land of the free,” when our nation has 1.5 million of its citizens locked up. They are anything but free. For this phrase to make sense, it becomes necessary to say “the land of the free and those imprisoned for crimes against the freeholders.” Since many politicians can’t remember that many words without notes, you seldom run across them.
We’re told that we live in the “age of technology.” While life has been made considerably easier through the invention of work-saving devices, we really are still on the “cutting edge” (another improper term unless you’re a sword swallower) with lots of bugs to be ironed out. If you think we’re in the midst of technology, then why did we spend billions of dollars to make sure our world didn’t collapse when the calendar turned to Year 2000?
Is it really technology when your computer goes down, when power brownouts roll through states like a churning sea or the state of Missouri mistakenly dishes out millions of dollars because of computer glitches?
And then there’s “road rage,” a relatively new phenomena used to describe frustrated motorists who believe they own the road they’re driving and commit all kinds of mayhem behind the wheel. The road isn’t raging; the drivers are. Even the U.S. Postal Service is involved. The principal duty of USPS, we’re told, is “free delivery.” How can it be free if you have to pay to have your letter delivered?
Life is increasingly like the words we use to describe it: complex, confusing, misleading, and, yes, oxymoronic.
[Missouri News & Editorial Service, Inc. Copyright (C) 2001 MNES Corp.]