An (oxy)moronic tale....

One of my goals for starting a blog was for it to be seriously funny but I thought that would be an oxymoron. Now who doesn’t like a good oxymoron now and then?   By definition, an oxymoron is:  A figure of speech in which incongruous or seemingly contradictory terms appear side by side, a compressed paradox.

Did you know that the plural that term is “oxymora”?  So if you use the term “oxymorons” than you may be exactly wrong!

Now there are a few more things that I learned about oxymora.  I first went to the king of linguistic literary trivia, Richard Lederer.  (He refers to himself as: "The Wizard of Idiom," "Attila the Pun," and "Conan the Grammarian.)  This guy is one of my favorites as he wrote an entire book dedicated to puns titled: Get Thee To A Punnery.” It should be noted that oxymora can come in the form of single compound words like “bridegroom” or they can be combinations of opposite words like “wicked good”, (a classic New England term used on a daily basis!) 

Whole sentences can also create oxymoronic humor. Here’s a classic example by 
Rodney (“I get no respect”) Dangerfield, who died Oct. 5, 2004. 

 We sleep in separate rooms, we have dinner apart, we take separate vacations. We're doing everything we can to keep our marriage together.

Another linguistic hero and champion of irreverent humor was George Carlin, who died on June 22, 2008.  Remember his bit about the 7 words you can’t say on television?  Thanks to HBO, that taboo has sailed. (Now that was a good example of a mixed metaphor, and I never metaphor I did not like, but we’ll leave that for another blog.) 

How about this famously clever George Carlin oxymoron?

 "How is it possible to have a civil war?"   (Or a “Holy War?”)

So I wondered, could I write a terribly good story using as many oxymora as possible? 

(Note: It will help if you picture George Carlin delivering this story; it will be more amusing.)

A Damned Good Story

Jeanne Poole was a student teacher and her course was speechwriting.   She primarily used Microsoft Works to prepare the final draft of her lectures. Each lecture started with the words: “Now then, let us begin.”  Ultimately she hoped to break through the old boy network to one day pursue a career writing press releases.

One night she ate a number of disparate things in random order.  Soon afterward she got a gentle turbulence in her stomach, which got increasingly worse. She decided her only choice was to drive herself to the hospital. The anxious patient ran out to her Dodge Ram pickup, (which she had bought sight unseen.) Turning a blind eye to the weather, she drove off at a deliberate speed and faced the inevitable possibility that she might have a crash landing, leaving her fatally injured. If she went off the road, she hoped that her truck would only receive minimal front-end damage that would not cost her a small fortune. She did not want to be found missing or floating to the bottom of a pond. She hoped that she would not run into anyone she knew as she was wearing loose tights under her tight slacks. That would be pretty ugly! 

She felt that her malaise might be a common abnormality but then again, it may have been food poisoning from either the boneless ribs or fresh frozen jumbo shrimp she had for dinner the previous night.  She was clearly confused, as she had made the deliberate mistake of eating a cold hotdog with hot chili sauce for breakfast, which she had done countless numbers of times before.  This was a new tradition that she wished she had skipped! She thought she could at least make it to the Mobil Station if she needed a bathroom.  But there was nothing much left in her system.  It was almost exactly the same thing that had happened to her last time she ate some bad turkey ham.  Was it bad judgment or merely bad luck, she wondered?

She finally reached the hospital, which was one of her least favorite places.  She had a love hate relationship with all things medical. As she waited she thought to herself, “this is another fine mess I’ve gotten myself into.”  She went over to the water cooler and used of those little plastic glasses to get a drink.  She felt as if she was a low priority and if she was able to get seen in less that 4 hours it would be a minor miracle.  She was surprised to be called after a brief wait, which was rarely done and examined by a young doctor, who turned out to be a sensitive guy.   He gave her even odds that her digestive system had an uninvited guest and that he was almost certain that the ultimate remedy was doing nothing.  He prescribed a wholesome yogurt smoothy and rest, which would be a relaxing exercise.  

She left the E.R. with a bittersweet feeling of being poorer but relieved.  As she came to a rolling stop at the intersection, she tuned in her favorite soft rock station on the radio and blasted  “Happy” by Pharrell, which was destined to be an instant classic!

I hope you’ll say; “wicked good story, Steve E. Reno!”