Oxymoron is a word formed from the Greek words ὀξύς (oksus), “sharp, pointed, keen,” and μωρός (moros), “dull, stupid, foolish.” An oxymoron is a contradiction in terms. Even the word is a contradiction in terms (i.e. “sharp dull”).

We mostly think in terms of comical oxymorons, such as

• jumbo shrimp
• educational television
• military intelligence
• business ethics
• civil war
• happily married
• Microsoft Works
• tall shortstop

The term sophomore (used to denote the second year of high school or college in the US) is an oxymoron, (sophos, “smart” + moros, “stupid”).

Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is full of them: “brawling love,” “loving hate,” “heavy lightness” etc.

I’m sure that you can think of a few more…

I spent a lot of time with my mother when I would go to Chicago on business. After she retired, she would still get up and have coffee with me before I left for work, and we would read the Chicago Tribune. I was most interested in the sports and some of the front section, while she would immediately turn to what we liked to call “the Irish sport pages,” i.e. the death notices. If a person was relatively famous (the owner of a business, an executive at one of the major employers, a member of the clergy, etc.) they would get an obituary, which would recount some of the highlights of the person’s life, charitable organizations the person worked for, as well as surviving family members and arrangements for the wake, funeral, and burial. If they weren’t, they just got a simple death notice, stating when and where they died, listing the person’s surviving relatives, and the funeral arrangements.

Some people don’t like to have obituaries and death notices published. There are people who read the obituaries and death notices with an eye toward visiting the home when they know no one will be there and burgling the place while the occupants are busy burying their dead. I think there’s a special circle in hell for people who do that.

Mom started reading the death notices after Dad died. A few months after he died, his Aunt Genevieve died. She had never married, so she was also Genevieve Holton. Mom was at work, sitting in the teachers’ lounge at break time, reading the death notices, and came across Aunt Genevieve’s. She announced to all there, “well, I guess I can go home, I just found my death notice.” Her fellow teachers didn’t find it as funny as she did.

I think that’s why people read the death notices: to see if anyone they know has died, and to make sure they aren’t there.

Remember Venn diagrams when you were in school?

Venn diagram showing what letter shapes are common in the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic alphabets. By Watchduck (a.k.a. Tilman Piesk) (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

John Venn wrote a paper in 1880 called On the Diagrammatic and Mechanical Representation of Propositions and Reasonings where he showed how to use these diagrams to demonstrate propositions and relationships. The overlapping areas show where elements of two or more sets are common to both or all of them. For example, we see from the above diagram that the characters O, A, B, E, M, X, K, Y, T, H, and P are common to to the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic alphabets. That’s the triangular area where all three sets overlap, and is called the intersection of all three sets. In mathematical terms, if L is the Latin alphabet (upper right circle), G the Greek alphabet (upper left circle), and C is the Cyrillic alphabet (lower circle),

There are other overlaps, like the section that has letters in both the Latin and Greek alphabets but not in Cyrillic:

Wikipedia, which regular readers will recall is the blogger’s best friend, has a whole article on Venn diagrams and what they all represent. My only purpose in talking about this is to say that the intersection of two or more sets is where they overlap.