Alliteration/Oxymoron/Onomatopoeia

[Raminagrobis]

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?

Obviously yes, but what I meant by emphasising the word 'linguistic' was that the oxymoron is a kind of langauge game, in which we suspend some of the normal rules of communicative language.  When we use an oxymoron we appreciate it first and foremost at an abstract level; we might be able to associate it secondarily with a phemonemon we've experienced, but it takes some degree of cognitive 'work' to do that. The example you gave, 'deafening silence', is a good one. If you've never heard that phrase before, your first reaction would be: 'What can that mean? It's self-contradictory'. After this, your brain starts to decipher the phrase, and you find you can associate it with a specific experience. But that experience did not pre-exist the hearing of the phrase and the creation of this new concept.  In fact, the experience has been to some degree constructed by that particular form of language (no-one really (physiologically) experiences a deafening silence, you just have look at the anatomy of the ear-drum to know that).

Anyway, all that is beside the point (which was that a phrase, taken as a whole, cannot be both oxymoron and onomatopeia). 'Deafening silence' is certainly not an onomatopoeia; but more than that, no phrase that expresses the idea of 'deafening silence' could possibly be an onomatopoeia. What would it sound like? How would it express that concept phonetically? Of course, many oxymorons seem to have a particular resonance, to express an idea in a particularly evocative way, but you'd have have a very broad defintition to call them 'onomatopoeic'.

[Johnny Yesno]

Wasn't the idea to find a phrase that had an onomatopoeic word in it? Surely the whole phrase wasn't expected to be onomatopoeic. I can't think of ANY meaningful phrases with more than one onomatopoeic word in a row, never mind them being oxymoronic to boot. For example, "Crash! Bang! Wallop!" is just a series of onomatopoeia - the words don't modify each other's meanings.

[Matthias]

Nelly's nipples nearly always make a nice ping when pinched.

Am I the only person to have constructed an actual sentence out of these rules? Eh?

Aliteration = nelly's, nipples. nearly, nice, ping, pinched
Oxymoron = nearly always
Onomatopoeic = ping


My name's Matthias, you've been great. Goodnight.