 To get a sense of what the term oxymoron means, let's consider its word origin. The first half of the word derives from the ancient Greek word auxus, meaning sharp. The second half of the word comes from the ancient Greek word moros, meaning dull or foolish. If we put them together, we get a very strange concept, sharply dull. As this origin suggests, oxymoron is itself an oxymoron. It's a rhetorical term that describes words or phrases that, when placed together, create paradoxes or contradictions. These contradictions seem foolish, but if we think about them for a bit, they often turn out to be sharp observations about our world. Let's hasten slowly to an example. One of the states that borders Oregon is Nevada, and within it is the city of Reno. That city, as many of you know, calls itself the biggest little city in the world, which seems foolish. How can you measure the biggest little city? The slogan goes back to the early 20th century, when Reno was quite small. But as the oxymoron suggests, even at that date, Reno aspired to offer the same big city amenities as the dominant mega cities of its time, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and so on. Thus the oxymoron is sharply dull, or appropriately inappropriate. Oxymorons are a favorite literary device of poets, particularly when they express complex feelings such as love and desire. Consider the sonnet. One feature of this kind of poem is its tendency to describe love as a strange mixture of pain and pleasure. Here's an example from Francesco Petrarch, the creator of the form. Sweet anger, sweet disdain, and sweet peace. Sweet ills, sweet troubles, and sweet burdens. Sweet speech and sweetly understood, how with sweet fire now filled with sweet airs, soul don't complain, but suffer in silence, and temper the sweet bitterness that hurts you with the sweet honor loving her has brought you to whom I say you alone please me. Here's another from Lady Mary Roth's 17th century sonnet sequence, Pamphylia Tamphilantis, which describes the painful pleasure the speaker feels when she's thinking of her lover. Heat and desire, while frosts of care I prove, wanting my love, yet surfeit due with love burn, and yet freeze, better in hell to be. Most famously, Shakespeare gets in on the act in Romeo and Juliet, when, early in the play, Romeo contemplates his feelings for his first love, Roslyn, before of course meeting Juliet. Why then, o brawling love, o loving hate, o anything of nothing first create, o heavy lightness, serious vanity, misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms, feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health, still waking sleep, that is not what it is. This love feel I, that feel no love in this. What all of these oxymorons convey is the strange, maddening mixture of feelings that constitutes petrarchan desire, and that continues to structure the way we think about love to this day. As the contemporary rhetorician John Cougar Melloncamp sings, sometimes love don't feel like it should, you make it hurt so good. Let me leave with one final, more complex example of an oxymoron taken from Claude McKay's famous sonnet, America. Within the poem, the Jamaican-American poet repurposes the petrarchan convention of pleasure-pain to describe his complex feelings for the country where he'd made his home. Although she feeds me bread of bitterness, and sinks into my throat her tiger's tooth, stealing my breath of life, I will confess, I love this cultured hell that tests my youth. Within the poem, America is represented metaphorically as McKay's unrequited lover. A place of immense beauty and opportunity, but also a place of racism, hatred, and violence. This paradoxical history of America is embodied in the oxymoron cultured hell, which initially seems a foolish phrase, but upon closer examination reveals a sharp portrait of the nation's many contradictions. I encourage you to read the rest of the poem to see how McKay processes this oxymoronic love and, in a related sense, how he breathes new life into a very old genre.