(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.
Soliloquy
Definition:
(n.) The act of talking to one's self; a discourse made by one in solitude to one's self; monologue.
(n.) A written composition, reciting what it is supposed a person says to himself.
Example Sentences:
(1) But rather than take my seat, the bell was my signal to take the stage, from where I delivered an hour-long soliloquy.
(2) Deliciously groomed and styled by someone who seemingly doesn't hate women, Jodie Foster was fully prepared for the biggest soliloquy of her life.
(3) This essay is an attempt to pull together a multiplicity of phenomena variously called "private speech," "egocentric speech," "self-communicative speech," "self-guiding speech" or "soliloquy" within a unified perspective.
(4) In Britain the conversation had been largely a soliloquy conducted by Jamie Oliver, who has raised the price of soda in his restaurants, with the money going to children’s anti-obesity programmes.
(5) Then the militia guy, who was in his twenties, delivered the strangest soliloquy I have ever heard in my life, more surreal than anything else I’ve experienced, even on stage, from Beckett on down.
(6) An "intrapersonal soliloquy" is exemplified by the person who has looked up a telephone number in the directory and repeats it to himself for better retention as he prepares to dial the telephone, while "interpersonal soliloquy" is illustrated by one's rehearsal of a speech destined for public delivery.
(7) An example of what can be called "regressive soliloquy" is the instinctive cry of a newborn baby or the involuntary curse of a person who has just struck his thumb with a hammer.
(8) Bang!” soliloquy eerily reminiscent of his research – even though her life has been nowhere near as rough as Gilligan’s case studies.
(9) Meanwhile "A Striking Soliloquy" sums up the commuter's dilemma – so akin to that of Shakespeare's most troubled hero – in just six well-chosen syllables.
(10) You could see the Lord Justice's brows furrow as he dumped a little soliloquy of problems in Tony Blair's lap last week.
(11) We have programmed a computer interview to facilitate soliloquy and have studied its effectiveness.
(12) Arena's main soliloquy is breathtaking: wearing a face-painted mask of kaleidoscopic colours and in drag (a red dress), his character declaims a kind of manifesto: "I wish to live in the drama of schism, of division … Live for a different idea, cultivate love for another possibility unforeseen, full of attraction and danger, necessary, inevitable, fatal... " Written by Punzo, made rhetorical by Arena, who speaks his lines with a mixture of mockery and defiance, across a range of facial expression that excites as much as it discomforts.
(13) Tamblyn made her loathsome character pop and fizz, Jackson was very Jackson (at one point, he bursts out laughing and say, "I can't believe I'm reading this...." - a horrifying, blowjob-heavy soliloquy), and Goggins earns his second-lead status effortlessly.
(14) You can imagine how much “wisdom” his three minute soliloquy on the dangers of encryption contained.
(15) She would spin a 15-minute soliloquy, her arms waving and her face one big smile, about having no home, about riding the subway at night to sleep and staying away from men trying to grab her in the dark: “Of course I pissed in my pants.
(16) What with his flair for introspection, his gift for ribald parody, his excoriating candour, his contempt for 'phoneyness', his weakness for soliloquy and his desperate conviction that the time is out of joint, Jimmy Porter is the completest young pup in our literature since Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.
(17) But Armando took me by the hand, led me into the rehearsal space, I did my soliloquy, and he liked it.
(18) Travellers who started their working week this morning with a long, rainy trudge to the office as a result of the latest round of industrial action by LU staff now have a little poetic solace on offer in the form of two new McGough poems: "A Striking Soliloquy" and "Tube strike Haiku".
(19) Later Martin Freeman's Watson delivered an affecting soliloquy at Holmes's presumed grave – unaware that Holmes (or someone just like him) was watching.
(20) 'The result is the beginning of a conversation, not the closing statement of a soliloquy.'