(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.
Personification
Definition:
(n.) The act of personifying; impersonation; embodiment.
(n.) A figure of speech in which an inanimate object or abstract idea is represented as animated, or endowed with personality; prosopop/ia; as, the floods clap their hands.
Example Sentences:
(1) He was a convert to Islam and the personification of Black Pride.
(2) And surviving that moment of iconoclasm early on 9 May , the personification of Labour’s failure.
(3) Alien limb sign includes failure to recognise ownership of one's limb when visual cues are removed, a feeling that one body part is foreign, personification of the affected body part, and autonomous activity which is perceived as outside voluntary control.
(4) This found its personification in the disappointing Ross Barkley, whose burst from near his area before an awry pass was indicative of his contribution throughout.
(5) Ahmed Wali Karzai , who was gunned down in his home in Kandahar by a bodyguard, was in many ways the personification of modern-day Afghanistan – corrupt, treacherous, lawless, paradoxical, subservient and charming.
(6) The abundant data indicate that the shamanistic priest, who was highly placed in the stratified society, guided the souls of the living and dead, provided for the transmutation of souls into other bodies and the personification of plants as possessed by human spirits, as well as performing other shamanistic activities.
(7) The presenters' personification of nursing leadership and management concepts, as well as the descriptions of specific "how to" strategies, provided a valuable ingredient for reinforcing the theoretical concepts.
(8) In the same breath, my body cannot bring itself to believe it is the personification of power, though it evidently is in any rational accountancy of social status.
(9) Nancy Pelosi , the Democratic minority leader, said Giffords was the "personification of courage".
(10) From this is abstracted the idea of 'father' both as a component of the self representation and as the personification of the urge towards continuing development.
(11) That potency was intensified by the media’s eagerness to style him as the personification of Isis malevolence.
(12) In a matter of days Erdoğan has become the personification of all the corrupt despotism and violence of the old Kemalist Turkey he was elected to sweep away.
(13) There is also a concern that she has become the personification of Burmese democracy and this is dangerous.
(14) Simplified to a yellow skull on a shrouded body curved in an S shape, thin, serpentine hands against the emaciated cheeks and covering its ears, the personification of unhappiness stretches its mouth open in a vertical oval, and screams.
(15) Hokhma too was a victim of what might be called the "study-hall syndrome" – when a phalanx of scholarly men elected to write the personification of female wisdom out of the centre and into the margins.
(16) This Mason was Mr Elocution, if you like, the personification of affectation and lingering insult or innuendo.
(17) Cardiff huffed and puffed in response but a top-notch save by Adrián at Fraizer Campbell's expense denied them equality and Mark Noble, the personification of dreadnought spirit, doubled the margin with a smart finish in added time.
(18) Mr Cooke himself even described the late BCCI chairman Agha Abedi as "the living personification of Uriah Heep".
(19) One critic labelled him the "personification of the new amorality of avaricious, red-top, vulgar new Britain".
(20) I'd completely remove the personification in terms of the celebration.