Oxymoron

Put this in the category of words that surprise me.  Oxymoron is a term somewhat in decline.  It is in some ways a more polite age.  Referring to someone as a moron is considered bad manners.  Except in heated political discussions of course.

But it got me wondering.  What does oxygen have to do with morons?  No, not like this....

The term refers to a seeming contradiction.  Pick your own examples but the one that got me pondering this was "political science".  Politics has plenty of emotion and conniving.  Science?  Not so much.

So here's the story.

Oxymoron is a surprisingly old word (1650's) and is an example of itself!  It comes to us by the combination of two Greek words, oxys and moros.  Moros of course means "stupid".  It has survived intact from ancient times with the occasional flourish such as Bugs Bunny's Bronxian euphemism "What a Maroon".  

Oxys means sharp.  So combining Sharp and Dull in one word creates the implicit contradiction that defines an oxymoron.

So where does oxygen come into all this?

It actually wandered in late.  Once chemistry emerged from the mystical alchemy days there was quite the effort to define and explain things.  A couple of chemists discovered oxygen at about the same time in the late 1770's, with a Joseph Priestly referring to it as "dephlogisticated air".  Phlogiston was a hypothetical fire-like substance felt to be present in matter.  It all dates back to the Ancient Greeks who had this notion of the universe being made of earth, wind, fire....and water.   Priestly and company had not quite shaken off the Alchemist era I guess.

A Frenchman named Antoine Levasseur proposed the alternate name Oxygen.  He believed that this new stuff was essential in the formation of all acidic compounds.  Oxys as it happens had alternate meanings to the Greeks.  Sharp, sour, acidic all in one word.  One must assume they had a few amphorae of wine go bad on them.

The people who had started using oxymoron over a century earlier had no concept of oxygen at all.

So go ahead, use oxymoron any way you like.  It can mean Sharp/Stupid or Sour/Stupid.  The latter is more common in all ages of history but the former a more useful rhetorical device.

By the way, Priestly's biography is pretty wild stuff.  Invented carbonated water and helped found Unitarianism.  Supported French and American Revolutions.  A mob burned down his house house in England and he had to flee to America.