On Mon, Jan 28, 2002 at 03:06:24PM -0800, Rick Stevens wrote:
> Uh, I never said IBM ;-) I said "a three-letter-acronym" company.
> There were several. The one I dealt with was in Massachusetts, had
> a real penchant for three-letter acronyms and used a programming
> dialect which was the only single word oxymoron in the English
> language (enough hints yet?).
Nope, I haven't got it yet. But, a note on "single-word oxymorons", from
http://www.wordways.com/oxymoron.htm:
Appropriately, the word oxymoron is itself oxymoronic because
it is formed from two Greek roots of opposite meaning, oxys
"sharp, keen," and moros "foolish," the same root that gives us
the word moron . Noting that oxymoron is a single-word oxymoron
consisting of two morphemes that are dependent in English, the
intrepid linguist senses a rich opportunity to impose order on
seeming chaos, to extract significance from the swirl of data
that escape through the holes in people's faces, leak from their
pens, and glow on their computer screens.
With books such as Warren S. Blumenfeld's Jumbo Shrimp and Pretty
Ugly (Perigee, 1986, 1989) selling so well, oxymora (my preferred
plural form) were a hot language item in the 1980s. Now that we
can recollect that decade with some tranquility, it is time to
attempt a taxonomy of the collected oxymoronic specimens and to
set the aborning discipline of oxymoronology in some order.
Single-word oxymora composed of dependent morphemes The more in
oxymoron also gives us the more in sophomore, a "wise fool"--and
there are indeed many sophomoric sophomores. Other, examples:
pianoforte ("soft-loud"), preposterous ("before-after"), and
superette ("big-small").
Jeff
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