What's the difference between irony and oxymoron?

Irony


Definition:

  • (a.) Made or consisting of iron; partaking of iron; iron; as, irony chains; irony particles.
  • (a.) Resembling iron taste, hardness, or other physical property.
  • (n.) Dissimulation; ignorance feigned for the purpose of confounding or provoking an antagonist.
  • (n.) A sort of humor, ridicule, or light sarcasm, which adopts a mode of speech the meaning of which is contrary to the literal sense of the words.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) And the irony of it is it doesn't interest me at all.
  • (2) The irony of this type of self-manipulation is that ultimately the child, or adult, finds himself again burdened by impotence, though it is the impotence of guilt rather than that of shame.
  • (3) The irony is that we have more media than ever before, but less insight.
  • (4) Richard Aylard, director of sustainability and external affairs for Thames Water, said the firm was aware of the irony that heavy rain had set in after the hosepipe ban was announced.
  • (5) One of the terrible ironies of the Iraq War is that President Bush used the threat of nuclear terrorism to invade a country that had no active nuclear program.
  • (6) That he was able to keep his secret treasures here, not in some remote corner of the globe but in the centre of the city that gave birth to the National Socialist movement, is both extraordinary and not short of a certain dark irony.
  • (7) He is wary of pretension, alive to all shades of irony.
  • (8) There was a thing at the time that said basically: 'Oh, the working classes obviously don't understand this is irony, so Harry's had to kill him off.'
  • (9) But the character – compounded of piercing sanity and existential despair, infinite hesitation and impulsive action, self-laceration and observant irony – is so multi-faceted, it is bound to coincide at some point with an actor’s particular gifts.
  • (10) The irony of her image being exchanged in return for commodities in the future,” she said, “seems to recall the way that actual slaves’ bodies were serving as currencies of exchange.” Larson arrived at a different conclusion about the honor.
  • (11) In the end, though, practical rethinkers have to get beyond the delights of irony and paradox in which Glasman too often wraps himself.
  • (12) There is a perverse irony that people who have cracked their iPhones are now being targeted by hackers.
  • (13) The irony of this is that today, when I was getting all of this horrible antisemitic shit that I’ve only ever seen in Russia, I was reminded that 26 years ago today my family came to the US from Russia.
  • (14) The irony is an uncomfortable one for policymakers.
  • (15) Because of our slightly younger average age and city location, we were supposedly one of the "new wave" WIs that had started springing up in the years before – groups that rejected crochet and did more modern activities, often with more than a tinge of irony.
  • (16) White House officials said that Obama, who was planning to work on the final draft of his speech on his flight from Washington to Oslo, would directly address the issue of the irony of being awarded the peace prize while escalating the war.
  • (17) Labour's pensions spokesman, Gregg McClymont, said: "The irony is that there are lots of good pension schemes out there that are being undermined by what is going on.
  • (18) She is being helpful, no doubt about that, but there is an unconscious note of power play – not to mention the sweet irony of my having provoked her into pulling not one but two phones out of her bag within seconds of us sitting down.
  • (19) "The irony of welcoming to the London 2012 Olympic Games an individual who is alleged to have led an organised and brutal repression of athletes because they peacefully exercised their internationally recognised right to freedom of expression and association during Bahrain's Arab Spring would be a blow to all athletes around the world, and irreconcilable with the UK commitment to human rights and claimed support to peaceful pro-democracy movements," the ECCHR said.
  • (20) A h, the irony of white people complaining about being interrupted by black people.

Oxymoron


Definition:

  • (n.) A figure in which an epithet of a contrary signification is added to a word; e. g., cruel kindness; laborious idleness.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) My father, Peter Self, who was, oxymoronically, a “political scientist”, wrote numerous books, which, while often technical in character, were nonetheless informed by his own rather gentle and utopian socialism.
  • (2) A cinema hall in August … less the start of a sentence than an oxymoron, I know.
  • (3) Airport expansion would be a non-starter, as would any more money on carbon capture and storage, and the oxymoronic idea of "clean coal".
  • (4) If Scottish self-esteem, a phrase that makes one psychoanalyst I know reach for the term "oxymoron", is reflected in our statistics for liver disease, drug-addiction, obesity, young male suicide and domestic abuse, we're not in great shape.
  • (5) So for me, Muslim feminist, Christian feminist, Jewish feminist, it's all oxymoronic.
  • (6) The headline “ Rivalry is now part of higher education’s DNA ” (5 August) is an oxymoron.
  • (7) To most people, the phrase "recreational maths" is an oxymoron.
  • (8) For a start, it suggests trust is not so much a trump card in Eastleigh as an irrelevance: unfairly, the very idea of a trustworthy MP is fast becoming an oxymoron.
  • (9) In February 2015 the Ecuadorian president, Rafael Correa, called Oliver an “oxymoron” because he was an “English comedian”, after Oliver accused of him being thin-skinned.
  • (10) It seems oxymoronic to prescribe yet more war as the solution.
  • (11) That's what the UK's Foresight report argued a few months ago, calling for the oxymoronic "sustainable intensification".
  • (12) That such an oxymoron can exist is a credit to the legal gymnastics achieved by the Department of Justice, which is effectively allowing federal drug laws to be routinely flouted without consequence, so long as the law-breaking is done within a state-regulated and licensed system.
  • (13) While the term feels like an oxymoron, it’s used more often within the energy industry to refer to an expensive technology called carbon capture and storage (CCS) that once promised to keep coal power a dominant source of electricity for decades to come.
  • (14) But when I posted a blog inviting readers to suggest questions for you, someone [Newtownian1] said I should put it to you that green growth is an oxymoron.
  • (15) But by creating the ultimate oxymoron of diet food – something you eat to lose weight – it squared a seemingly impossible circle.
  • (16) If Maria Miller, the culture secretary, has sat in as many conferences on the "future of news" as I have recently (and I hope for her sake she hasn't), then she might have hesitated before defining what kind of "press" would be affected by the oxymoronic draft royal charter on self-regulation of the press .
  • (17) The manifesto message for councils is not promising; a “national framework” for devolution is oxymoronic, while the social care plans show little or no awareness of council function or finance.
  • (18) Everyone knows it’s wrong, but nobody does anything about it – just as they know that British complicity in torture and rendition from 2001 onwards was also wrong, but will again be endorsed by a boneless establishment, which believes that institutional law-breaking is an oxymoron.
  • (19) Just pablum about “shareholder capitalism” (an oxymoron if there ever was one) and “enlightened corporations” that are oh-so-kind enough to give working-class Americans jobs.
  • (20) But the language of paradox, oxymoron and subtle contradiction – the language of children – does better.