(n.) A trope in which one word is put for another that suggests it; as, we say, a man keeps a good table instead of good provisions; we read Virgil, that is, his poems; a man has a warm heart, that is, warm affections.
Example Sentences:
(1) The two patient groups showed quite relevant differences as to their own expressive modalities in the use of metaphor and metonymy, which are considered as the graphic representation means of the illness.
(2) Fort McMurray is more than an environmental hotspot, more than a metonymy for oil sands, more than a grail for jobseekers and grifters.
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.