oxy moron — two words, allegedly

for nine years i thought oxy-moron was a brand of moron. like a premium tier. i had ranked myself accordingly. last week stefan said the word in a sentence and i realized it was one word. one. i sat with that for an hour. nine years gone. the third yoga mat watched.

at the desk. carla, last seen, was heading into compliance. afternoon hours, until 4pm. probably a little longer.

the trouble started, as most of my linguistic crises do, at 2 am, in the dark, in the apartment, with the laptop open and 47 tabs running and a revelation coming on. the revelation, in this case, was that i had, for many years, been reading the word “oxymoron” as “oxy moron” — two words — and assuming the word was a clinical category for a particularly oxygen-rich kind of moron. like an athlete moron. a moron in good cardiovascular health.

i’d like to apologize to the english language for that.

oxy moron: a misreading of the word oxymoron, which is a figure of speech combining two contradictory terms (e.g. “deafening silence”, “open secret”, “working from the office”). the misreading, mine, splits it into oxy + moron, which sounds like a category of well-ventilated idiot. it is not. it is, however, how i have been pronouncing it in my head since 2017.

OXYMORON. ONE. WORD. I. CHECKED.

oxymoron, the figure of speech, correct version

the actual word is “oxymoron”, one word, no space, no hyphen, no division. it comes — i looked this up on a website that knows things, the kind of website i’d rather not name in a post like this — from two greek words that, between them, mean roughly “sharp” and “dull”. which is, itself, an oxymoron. the word for “two contradictory things put together” is, in its origin, two contradictory things put together. that’s the kind of detail that makes a person stop, on a friday afternoon at the desk, and just sit there for a minute.

so an oxymoron is when you stick two words together that should not, on paper, agree, and the result is a phrase that says something a single word cannot. examples include deafening silence, which we’ve all felt; act naturally, which is what they tell you on every audition; working from home, which is a phrase that has been doing some heavy lifting since 2020; and jumbo shrimp, which is the example everyone uses because it is, in fairness, the cleanest one.

this is what your english teacher meant. this is what the textbook said. this is the version that is correct. moving on.

oxy + moron, my misreading, weekly

here’s where we get to the personal angle, by which i mean the part of the post my employer would, if asked, prefer i not write. i had, for years, been reading the word as if it were two words, and i had been picturing, every time, a specific kind of person. let me describe them.

the oxy moron, in my misreading, was a moron with great lung capacity. a moron who took deep breaths. a moron at altitude. a moron who, despite being a moron, had a fitness tracker and a hydration goal. the oxy moron worked out at lunch. the oxy moron had opinions about magnesium. the oxy moron oxygenated his way through life. it was, in retrospect, a beautiful invention. it was also wrong.

examples of actual oxymora i have collected

i have, on this laptop, in a tabs cluster i don’t dare close, a list of oxymora i’ve been collecting since the 2 am revelation. i’m not going to share the whole list. i’ll share the ones that don’t make me sound, on the record, worse than i already am.

• working lunch — the lunch is not lunch, the work is not work, both parties leave hungry and unproductive.
• same difference — a phrase used by people who do not want to admit they were wrong about something small.
• open secret — what carla and i have, regarding the fact that i write blog posts on company time. neither of us has said it out loud.
• only choice — what a thing becomes after all the other choices have, on inspection, turned out to be either expensive or terrifying.
• act naturally — the instruction that has ruined more first dates than every other instruction combined.
• seriously funny — what a friend of mine, named stefan, says about himself after his second glass of wine. stefan is not seriously funny. stefan is, on his second glass of wine, sincerely confident that he is. the gap between the two is, itself, a kind of oxymoron.

i could go on. there is also “honest politician”, but i was warned by the canon that politics is off-limits in this post, so we’ll skip that one. there is also “minor surgery”, which only sounds minor when it is happening to someone else.

the moron part, i have credentials

here’s where the misreading does, accidentally, land on something true. the word, when split, contains the word “moron”. and i, by historical and behavioral standards, qualify as one. i am on the record about my preferred terminology in this area, and “moron” is, in my view, the term with the most dignity. it occupies the top step of a ladder no one wants to climb. it offers, on the inside of the package, more headroom than its competitors. i’ll wear the title.

so when i was reading “oxy moron” and picturing a fit moron, what i was, in some unconscious way, doing was looking for myself in the word. i wanted to be the high-functioning version of the thing i already was. i wanted oxygen. i wanted capacity. i wanted a moron with a fitness tracker.

i don’t have a fitness tracker. i have a 9-minute snooze and a phone at 23% and a hot take, which is that cereal is soup with rules, and i will defend that hot take in a separate post when the assignment list reaches it. the point is: my misreading was, in a quiet way, aspirational. i was reading the word and pictured the upgrade.

and the upgrade does not exist. the word is one word. the word is “oxymoron”. the figure of speech. that’s all. there is no athletic moron category. i checked. on three different sites. with stefan, who said, on his second glass of wine, that he was “fairly sure” but couldn’t, on the spot, source it. (stefan is fairly sure of most things and sources nothing. stefan is, in his way, a national resource.)

verdict, both readings work, only one is correct

carla is, by the schedule, still in compliance until 4. i have, by my own clock, written this in 88 minutes. that’s, on average, 14.7 words per minute. for a self-described moron, the math is itself a small revolt against the category.

that’s the post. that’s the topic. one word, two readings, a wednesday’s worth of confusion delivered on a friday. you can take it or leave it. i’d recommend leaving most of it.

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