Alliteration/Oxymoron/Onomatopoeia

[MonkeyDrummer]

I was asked by a friend a few months ago to come up with one sentence which would combine all of the above. I meant to post it here, but the site went down etc. etc. Anyway, can anyone come up with any. From 3 months of brain power i've only ever come up with one....Silent Slap. Are there anymore? Does anyone care?

[smoker]

freezing fire? it's alliteration btw.

[MonkeyDrummer]

That'll explain why my dictionary refused to even acknowledge it's existence,

[gazzyk1ns]

"Slimy soot" is the best one I can think of before Neighbours, I don't really know if "slimy" is truly onomatopoeic though, I'd say it was at least slightly so.

[big dogs cock]

Static Skid?

When looking for a shag there aren't many Picky Piss-Artists.

[Tokyo Sexwhale]

"Slimy soot" is the best one I can think of before Neighbours, I don't really know if "slimy" is truly onomatopoeic though, I'd say it was at least slightly so.

None of these are onomatopoeic, apart from, perhaps) "slap".

How about "quiet quack"?

[Tokyo Sexwhale]

Or "grim giggle"?

[Raminagrobis]

I think what he's asked you to do there is a logical paradox, since a phrase can't possibly be onomatopoeic and oxymoronic at the same time. As I understand it, an oxymoron is a purely rhetorical/poetic turn of phrase that refers to a concept rather than a real-world phenomenon. Conversely, an onomatopoeia has to refer to a something that can be experienced through the senses, usually a noise.
I suppose it would be possible to combine the three as separate components of a single phrase, but the phrase taken as a whole would be self-canceling.

I think.

[Johnny Yesno]

Ooh! Ooh! I've got one...

Crash course

Aaeeeyyyyythangyaw!

[falafel]

I think what he's asked you to do there is a logical paradox, since a phrase can't possibly be onomatopoeic and oxymoronic at the same time. As I understand it, an oxymoron is a purely rhetorical/poetic turn of phrase that refers to a concept rather than a real-world phenomenon. Conversely, an onomatopoeia has to refer to a something that can be experienced through the senses, usually a noise.
I suppose it would be possible to combine the three as separate components of a single phrase, but the phrase taken as a whole would be self-canceling.

I think.

Absolutely not.

"Drooling Dryness", anyone?

[Raminagrobis]

Absolutely not.

"Drooling Dryness", anyone?

How is that an onomatopoeia? 'Drooling' is vaquely onomatopoeic, I admit, but the phrase taken as a whole is definitely not, because it's a linguistic construct that does not describe any phenomenon that can be experienced outside of language.

[mwude]

wailing whisper?

subtle squawk?

thick thud?

not sure about the last one, but the first two sort of work

[Hairy Chin]

Does 'Glistening Grime' work?

Probably not, actually.

[Uncle_Z]

[sneer]If you liked that you'll love this[/sneer]

[Cambrian Times]

In the words of Damon Gough:

Silent Sigh

[gazzyk1ns]

"Slimy soot" is the best one I can think of before Neighbours, I don't really know if "slimy" is truly onomatopoeic though, I'd say it was at least slightly so.

None of these are onomatopoeic, apart from, perhaps) "slap".

How about "quiet quack"?

Slimy is a bit onomatopoeic. Your one is still better than mine though.

[Bogey]

Oxymoron: A rhetorical figure in which incongruous or contradictory terms are combined, as in a deafening silence and a mournful optimist.

Alliteration: The repetition of the same sounds or of the same kinds of sounds at the beginning of words or in stressed syllables, as in "on scrolls of silver snowy sentences" (Hart Crane).

Onomatopoeia: The formation or use of words such as buzz or murmur that imitate the sounds associated with the objects or actions they refer to.

So, the first two refer to constructions necessarily, the third to single words.
But I don't think it would be any way oxymoronic for a sentence to feature both an oxymoron and onomatopoeia, would it?

<all definitions nicked from dictionary.com by the way>

[Manford Thirty-Sixborough]

"He plinked upon the pianoforte"

Oxy = sharp (as in "Oxygen" - sharp gas)
Moron = blunt (as in Neil Warnock)

Oxymoron = Sharp-blunt - a contradiction in terms.

[gazzyk1ns]

Yeah I'm letting myself have slimy. It's a bit like "slither", something can slither without making any noise but most people class "slither" as being onomatopoeic.

Having said that if dictionary.com's definition is correct and correctly worded then slither isn't necessarily onomatopoeic because there is sometimes no noise being mimicked there. My understanding was that there are two slightly differnet interpretations of onomatopoeia, one being the very "blunt" one of which "plop" is a prime example, but I also thought that they could imitate actions associated with the words they refer to as well as sounds. e.g. "wisp" is onomatopoeic because it evokes a mental picture of the action with which something wispy moves. However, there is no noise associated with something wispy - smoke, or ghosts etc.

Am I wrong about that? It's a long time since I did A-Levels...

[Raminagrobis]

No, you're not wrong. In rhetoric, onomatopoeia has a secondary meaning as a word or phrase that is especially evocative or suggestive. It doesn't have to be a sound. However, I still maintain that it is impossible for an oxymoron to be onomatopoeic. By its very defintition, an oxymoron is a linguistic construction that only functions by virtue of the fact that it evokes a mental image/comcept that does not exist in the real world. An onomatopoeia, on the other hand, has to have a referent that can be experienced outside of language. You could counter this by saying that certain phrases evoke a vague idea of something by their very form, and that idea does not have to be a sensory phenomenon. But that moves a long way from the concept of 'onomatopoeia', and in fact is nothing other than 'poetic language'. For a phrase to be onomatopoeic, there must a priori be a discernable divide between phonetics and semantics, a divide which is bridged in the utterance of the phrase. In the case of an oxymoron, there can be no such divide, since the phrase exists by itself as a particularly unusual form of language, where the concept evoked cannot possibly be separated from the phrase you started with.

[Cheese Arse H Christ]

Peter Piper plopped a piece of perfect poo

[Cheese Arse H Christ]

Poetic prose

[Cheese Arse H Christ]

Partly perfect prattling

perfect plop

[Blue Jam]

Silent splash

God, I'm bored.

[Smackhead Kangaroo]

ONly one of these counts as a sentence in my book. Just complex phrases

[MonkeyDrummer]

I got a new one.

Fragrant Fart.

God, I went 3 months with nothing and i got two in a row.  Had to check the corrrect meaning of fragrant though. Is fart properly onomatopoeic?

fra·grant   adj.
Having a pleasant odor.

[Rats]

There would have been a good few in that "p" story I did but it's lost for ever, it might be in the archive but it would take years to find.

[Capuchin]

She makes me want to verb the adjective noun.

[Johnny Yesno]

Ooh! Ooh! I've got one...

Crash course

Aaeeeyyyyythangyaw!

Look! Mine's got an onomatopoeia - crash. And it's got an oxymoron - the verb to course can mean to race, which is the opposite of to crash. And it's alliterative. And it's an established expression.
So I'm going to give myself a big hand.

[falafel]

By its very defintition, an oxymoron is a linguistic construction that only functions by virtue of the fact that it evokes a mental image/concept that does not exist in the real world.

I'm sorry, you've got me absolutely stumped there. An oxymoron is a linguistic construction? Well, bugger me backwards, I never would have known. Thanks for that. But so is onomatopeia, surely?

Onomatopoeia is just as abstract an idea, if you consider language to be separate from reality. But the truth is, that that isn't the case. The two are hopelessly intertwined. An oxymoron is often used to describe actual 'images or concepts that exist in the real world' - the purpose of the device is not to create some sort of faintly amusing riddle but to effectively amplify the meaning of a word or idea, or to explore some new facet of it. Take the old 'deafening silence' thing - such a thing is a semantic impossibility, but it does have a real-world referent. The idea being that silence is something you hear just as much as noise is. Then again, looking at what you've said, it seems that you consider such use of the device to reduce it to being 'poetic language'. I'm quite sure that doesn't stop it being an oxymoron.

One of us has an incoherent argument. I hope it's not me.