How to understand – and use – English oxymorons

Jeanne Perrett
Woman and a child sat outdoors reading

If you had to explain what an oxymoron is, what would you say? And would you know how to use one correctly? You might even be using oxymorons already completely by accident. After all, how many times have you talked about a “small crowd”, described someone as a “big baby” or gossiped about an “open secret”?

Let’s explain more about the term. An is a figure of speech where two words of opposed or contradictory meaning are used together to create emphasis. While some oxymorons are created by accident – such as “small crowd” – sometimes they are used deliberately to draw attention to something or to create drama for the reader or listener. Let’s take a closer look at some popular English oxymorons and get to the bottom of what they actually mean.

What are oxymorons?
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1. Big baby

This is an oxymoron because all babies are small. The word ‘big’ is added to emphasize the fact that someone is acting more childishly than you would expect. All babies can be childish but, for some reason, adding the word ‘big’ communicates that the person you are talking about is even more childish than a regular-sized baby.

“The teacher told James not to be such a big baby when he complained about having too much homework.”

2. Act naturally

When you act, you are pretending to be someone that you are not naturally, and yet, it is very common to use the phrase “act naturally” to encourage someone to be themselves. This oxymoron works because often people have to work hard – against their desires – to just be themselves in certain company or in certain situations.

“When you meet your new boss, just act naturally.”

3. Organized mess

How can a mess be organized? This oxymoron is often used to describe the chaos that someone has created – but when they actually know where everything is.

“I can find everything on my desk because it is an organized mess.”

4. Open secret

If something is a secret, no one else is supposed to know about it. This oxymoron is a great way to describe a fact that started off as a secret, but now a select number of people know about it. Many people will gossip about this 'secret', but won’t necessarily spread it any further.

“Everyone at the party knew about Sarah’s new boyfriend as it was an open secret.”

5. Small crowd

By definition a crowd is a substantial amount of people – but adding the word 'small' makes it easier for us to imagine the difference between a crowd of 100 compared with a crowd of 500 people.

"We found a seat at the concert as there was only a small crowd of people there."

6. Deafening silence

Silence can't deafen you but it's used to describe a situation where there is a complete and noticeable lack of communication or noise. This absence of sound can be so powerful that it creates a significant emotional impact.

"The group was anxiously waiting for the doctor to respond. There was a deafening silence in the room."

7. Wise fool

Appearances can be deceiving. A wise fool is someone who seems foolish or unintelligent at first but may actually be wiser than you think.

"The hermit was a wise fool, offering meaning insights about life to those who visited him."

Oxymorons in the English language can be a terribly good way to enhance your writing and speaking, making it more varied and interesting. Try to remember any you come across and add it to your English repertoire. There are hundreds to find.

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    Grammar: how to tame the unruly beast

    By Simon Buckland

    “Grammar, which knows how to control even kings”?- 惭辞濒颈è谤别

    When you think of grammar, “rule” is probably the first word that pops into your mind. Certainly the traditional view of grammar is that it’s about the “rules of language”. Indeed, not so long ago, teaching a language meant just teaching grammatical rules, plus perhaps a few vocabulary lists. However, I’m going to suggest that there’s actually no such thing as a grammatical rule.

    To show you what I mean, let’s take the comparative of adjectives: “bigger”, “smaller”, “more useful”, “more interesting”, etc. We might start with a simple rule: for adjectives with one syllable, add -er, and for adjectives with two or more syllables, use more + adjective.

    But this doesn’t quite work: yes, we say “more useful”, but we also say “cleverer”, and “prettier”. OK then, suppose we modify the rule. Let’s also say that for two-syllable adjectives ending in -y or -er you add -er.

    Unfortunately, this doesn’t quite work either: we do say “cleverer”, but we also say “more sober” and “more proper”. And there are problems with some of the one-syllable adjectives too: we say “more real” and “more whole” rather than “realer” or “wholer”. If we modify the rule to fit these exceptions, it will be half a page long, and anyway, if we keep looking we’ll find yet more exceptions. This happens repeatedly in English grammar. Very often, rules seem so full of exceptions that they’re just not all that helpful.

    And there’s another big problem with the “rule approach”: it doesn’t tell you what the structure is actually used for, even with something as obvious as the comparative of adjectives. You might assume that it’s used for comparing things: “My house is smaller than Mary’s”; “John is more attractive than Stephen”. But look at this: “The harder you work, the more money you make.” Or this: “London is getting more and more crowded.” Both sentences use comparative adjectives, but they’re not directly comparing two things.

    What we’re actually looking at here is not a rule but several overlapping patterns, or paradigms to use the correct technical term:

    1. adjective + -er + than
    2. more + adjective + than
    3. parallel comparative adjectives: the + comparative adjective 1 … the + comparative adjective 2
    4. repeated comparative adjective: adjective + -er + and + adjective + -er/more and more + adjective

    This picture is more accurate, but it looks abstract and technical. It’s a long way from what we actually teach these days and the way we teach it, which tends to be organized around learning objectives and measurable outcomes, such as: “By the end of this lesson (or module) my students should be able to compare their own possessions with someone else’s possessions”. So we’re not teaching our students to memorize a rule or even to manipulate a pattern; we’re teaching them to actually do something in the real world. And, of course, we’re teaching it at a level appropriate for the student’s level.

    So, to come back to grammar, once we’ve established our overall lesson or module objective, here are some of the things we’re going to need to know.

    • What grammatical forms (patterns) can be used to express this objective?
    • Which ones are appropriate for the level of my students? Are there some that they should already know, or should I teach them in this lesson?
    • What do the forms look like in practice? What would be some good examples?

    Existing grammar textbooks generally don’t provide all this information; in particular, they’re very vague about level. Often they don’t even put grammar structures into specific CEFR levels but into a range, e.g. A1/A2 or A2/B1, and none fully integrates grammar with overall learning objectives.

    At 蜜桃app, we’ve set ourselves the goal of addressing these issues by developing a new type of grammar resource for English teachers and learners that:

    • Is based on the Global Scale of English with its precise gradation of developing learner proficiency
    • Is built on the Council of Europe language syllabuses, linking grammar to CEFR level and to language functions
    • Uses international teams of language experts to review the structures and assess their levels

    We include grammar in the GSE Teacher Toolkit, and you can use it to:

    • Search for grammar structures either by GSE or CEFR level
    • Search for grammar structures by keyword or grammatical category/part of speech
    • Find out at which level a given grammar structure should be taught
    • Find out which grammar structures support a given learning objective
    • Find out which learning objectives are related to a given grammar structure
    • Get examples for any given grammar structure
    • Get free teaching materials for many of the grammar structures

    Think of it as an open-access resource for anyone teaching English and designing a curriculum.