The word oxymoron comes from the Greek for pointedly foolish: 'oxys' means sharp or keen and 'moros' means foolish.
Richard Watson Todd shows us how easily we accept oxymorons as part of everyday speech in this paragraph from Much Ado About English. There are 10 in this example:
It was an
open secret that the company had used a
paid volunteer to test the
plastic glasses. Although they were made using
liquid gas technology and were an
original copy that looked
almost exactly like a more expensive brand, the volunteer thought that they were
pretty ugly and that it would be simply impossible for the general public to accept them. On hearing this feedback, the company board was
clearly confused and there was a
deafening silence. This was a
minor crisis and the only choice was to drop the product line.
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