OBJECTIVES

Identify figures of speech that show contrast (irony, oxymoron, paradox)

What is antithesis?

Antithesis is a figure of speech which refers to the juxtaposition of opposing or

contrasting ideas. It involves the bringing out of a contrast in the ideas by an obvious
contrast in the words, clauses, or sentences, within a parallel grammatical structure.

Examples:

These are examples of antithesis:

"Man proposes, God disposes." - Source unknown.

"Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing." - Goethe.
"That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." - Neil Armstrong.
"To err is human; to forgive divine." - Alexander Pope.
"Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice." - William Shakespeare.
"Many are called, but few are chosen." Matthew 22:14.

What is an epigram?

An epigram refers to a concise, witty, memorable, and sometimes surprising or satirical

statement. The origin of the word epigram is Greek, from epigraphein (epi- + graphein to
write)

Examples

Some examples of epigram are listed below:

The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."
(Tacitus)
"I am not young enough to know everything."
(Oscar Wilde)
"Arguments are to be avoided; they are always vulgar and often convincing."
(Oscar Wilde)
"I can resist everything but temptation." - Oscar Wilde
"Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put and end to mankind." - John F.
Kennedy
"No one is completely unhappy at the failure of his best friend."
(Groucho Marx)

What is oxymoron?
An oxymoron is a figure of speech that combines incongruous or contradictory terms. The
plural is oxymorons or oxymora.

Examples:

An oximoron can be made of an adjective and a noun:

Dark light
Deafening silence
Living dead
Open secret
Virtual reality

Oximorons can also be a combination of a noun and a verb.

The silence whistles

What is irony?

Irony is a figure of speech in which there is a contradiction of expectation between what

is said and what is really meant. It is characterized by an incongruity, a contrast,
between reality and appearance. There are three types of irony: verbal, dramatic and
situational.

Types of irony

1. Verbal irony:
It is a contrast between what is said and what is meant
2. Dramatic irony:
It occurs when the audience or the reader knows more than the character about
events. In other words, what the character thinks is true is incongruous with what
the audience knows.
3. Situational irony:
This refers to the contrast between the actual result of a situation and what was
intended or expected to happen.

Examples of irony

His argument was as clear as mud.

The two identical twins were arguing. One of them told the other: "You're ugly"
The thieves robbed the police station.

What is euphemism?

Euphemism is used to express a mild, indirect, or vague term to substitute for a harsh,
blunt, or offensive term. Euphemism is often contrasted with dysphemism. Some
euphemisms intend to amuse, while others intend to give positive appearances to
negative events or even mislead entirely.

Examples:

These are examples of euphemism:

Going to the other side for death,

Do it or come together in reference to a sexual act.
Passed away for die.
On the streets for homeless.
Adult entertainment for pornography.
Comfort woman for prostitute
Between jobs for unemployed.

What is litotes?
Litotes is a figure of speech consisting of an understatement in which an
affirmative is expressed by negating its opposite. For example, instead of saying
that someone is mean, you can say he is not very generous.

Examples of litotes
He's not a very generous man.
She is not very beautiful.
He is not the friendliest person I 've met.
Don't be too wicked.
It won't be an easy trip
He is not unaware of his wife's foolishness.

Oxymoron, Antithesis, Irony - stylistic devices of contrast. Examples from

Literature
Oxymoron (Greek oxys + moros - "pointedly foolish") is a stylistic device the syntactic and semantic
structures of which come to clashes. It involves a combination of two contrasting ideas within the same
syntactical whole, thus ascribing some features to an object incompatible with it.
Antithesis (Greek anti + thesis - "opposition") is a stylistic device involving the use of a parallel
construction, the two parts of which must be semantically opposed to each other.
Irony (Greek eironeia - "mockery concealed") - as a trope - is a stylistic device in which the contextual
evaluative meaning of a word is directly opposite to its dictionary meaning.
The following information will provide more info on the peculiarities of each stylistic device.

Oxymoron

As a rule, one of the two members of oxymoron illuminates the feature which is universally observed and
acknowledged while the other one offers a purely subjective individual perception of the object.
Kukharenko names three structural patterns that are possible (the first three points in the table below),
the forth is mentioned in the text-book Stylistics by Galperin:
The structural pattern The examples
a. attributive structures "with careful carelessness" (Dickens)
(the most widely known structure)
b. verbal structures "to shout mutely" fining Shaw) "to cry
silently" (Wilson)
c. non-attributive structures "the street damaged by improvements"
(O. Henry) "silence was louder than
thunder"
(Updike)
d. adverbial-attributive structures "awfully pretty" (Cusack)
Oxymora rarely become trite, for their components, linked forcibly, repulse each other and oppose
repeated use. There are few colloquial oxymora. all of them showing a high degree of the speaker's
emotional involvement in the situation, as in "damn nice." "awfully pretty".
For instance: pay attention to the structure and semantics of the oxymora. Also notice which of their
members conveys the individually viewed feature of the object and which one reflects its generally
accepted characteristic:
1. If out of my meager vocabulary only the term unenthusiastic excitement comes anywhere near
describing the feeling with which all my thoughts were suffused, you must resolve my meaning from that
term's dissonance. (Earth)
2. "Heaven must be the hell of a place. Nothing but repentant sinners up there, isn't it?" (Delaney)
3. He opened up a wooden garage. The doors creaked. The garage was full of nothing. (Chandler)
4. He caught a ride home to the crowded loneliness of the barracks. (Jones)
5. Sprinting towards the elevator he felt amazed at his own cowardly courage. (Markey)
6. They were a bloody miserable lot - the miserablest lot of men I ever saw. But they were good to me.
Bloody good. (Steinbeck)
7. Harriet turned back across the dim garden. The lightless light looked down from the night
sky. (Murdoch)
8. It was an open secret that Ray had been ripping his father-in-law off. (Uh-nak)
9. A neon sign reads "Welcome to Reno - the biggest little town in the world." (A. M.)
10. Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield are Good Bad Boys of American literature. (Vallins)
11. He was sure the whites could detect his adoring hatred of them. (Wright)
Antithesis

In contrast to oxymoron the two opposed notions of an antithesis can refer to the same object of thought
or to different objects. Antithesis is based on the use of antonyms, both usual (registered in dictionaries)
and occasional or contextual. It is essential to distinguish between antithesis and what is
termed contrast. Contrast is a literary (not linguistic) device, based on logical opposition between the
phenomena set one against another.
Discuss the semantic centers and structural peculiarities of the following antitheses:
1. Don't use big words. They mean so little. (Wilde)
2. ... quite frequently, things that are obvious to other people aren't even apparent to me. (Barth)
3. ... drunkenness was an amusing but unquestioned vice: churchgoing a soporific but unquestioned
virtue. (Barth)
4. I like big parties. They are so intimate. At small parties there isn't any privacy. (Fitzgerald)
5. Rup wished he could be swift, accurate, compassionate and stem instead of clumsy and vague and
sentimental. (Murdoch)
6. His coat-sleeves being a great deal too long, and his trousers a great deal too short, he appeared ill at
ease in his clothes. (Dickens)
7. It is safer to be married to the man you can be happy with than to the man you cannot be happy
without. (Esar)
8. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of
foolishness, it was the epoch of belief it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the
season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair: we had everything before us.
we had nothing before us. we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in
short the period was so far like the present period, that some of its nosiest authorities insisted on its being
received for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only. (Dickens)
9. His fees were high: his lessons were light. (O. Henry)
Irony

Irony occurs when a person says one Thing but really means something else. Therefore, irony does not
exist outside the context. Irony is a wide-ranging phenomenon and may be achieved both by linguistic
and extra-linguistic means. Three kinds of irony are usually distinguished.
Verbal (or linguistic) irony is a figure of speech involving discrepancy between what is said and what is
meant. The context is arranged so that the qualifying word reverses the direction of the evaluation, and
the word positively charged is understood as a negative qualification and (much rarer) vice versa.
Besides, according to Skrebnev, irony can be based on stylistic incongruity. It happens when high-flown,
elevated linguistic units are used in reference to insignificant, socially low topics.
In cases of extra-linguistic irony it is usually extended over a whole story.
In dramatic irony the contrast is between what a character says and what the reader knows to be true.
The value of this kind of irony lies in the comment it implies on the speaker or the speaker's expectations.
In irony of situation (or irony of life) the discrepancy is between appearance and reality, or between
expectation and fulfillment, or between what is and what would seem appropriate.
Thus, irony makes it possible to suggest meanings without stating them. It can be used to convey both
the seriousness and humour of situations.

In the following excerpts you will find mainly examples of verbal irony. Explain how the context makes the
irony perceptible. Try to indicate the exact word whose contextual meaning diametrically opposes its
dictionary meaning.
1. She turned with the sweet smile of an alligator. (Steinbeck)
2. The book was entitled Murder at Milbury Manor and was a whodunit of the more abstruse type, in
which everything turns on whether a certain character, by catching the three-forty-three train at Hilbury
and changing into the four-sixteen at Mil-bury, could have reached Silbury by five-twenty-seven, which
would have given him just time to disguise himself and be sticking knives into people at Bilbury by six-
thirty-eight. (Woodhouse)
3. When the war broke out she took down the signed photograph of the Kaiser and. with some solemnity,
hung it in the men-servants" lavatory: it was her own combative action. (Murdoch)
4. From her earliest infancy Gertrude was brought up by her aunt. Her aunt had carefully instructed her to
Christian principles. She had also taught her Mohammedanism, to make sure. (Leacock)
5. She's a charming middle-aged lady with a face like a bucket of mud and if she has washed her hair
since Coolidge's second term. I'll eat my spare tire, rim and all. (Chandler)
6. With all the expressiveness of a stone Welsh stared at him another twenty seconds apparently hoping
to see him gag. (Chandler)
7. Apart from splits based on politics, racial, religious and ethnic backgrounds and specific personality
differences, we're just one cohesive team. (Uhnak)
8. I had been admitted as a partner in the firm of Andrews and Bishop, and throughout 1927 and 1928 I
enriched myself and the firm at the rate of perhaps forty dollars a month. (Barth)
9. But every Englishman is bom with a certain miraculous power that makes him master of the world. As
the great champion of freedom and national independence he conquers and annexes half the world and
calls it Colonization. (Bernard Shaw)

Identifying oxymoron, antithesis, and irony as well as defining the function performed in the following
examples:
1. Sara was a menace and a tonic, my best enemy; Rozzie was a disease, my worst friend. (Cory)
2. Mrs. Nork had a large home and a small husband. (Lewis)
3. Bookcases covering one wall boasted a half-shelf of literature. (Capote)
4. You have got two beautiful bad examples for parents. (Fitzgerald)
5. A very likeable young man with a pleasantly ugly face. (Cronin)
6. There were some bookcases of superbly unreadable books. (Waugh)
7. I liked him better than I would have liked his father... We were fellow strangers. ( Greene)
8. All this blood and fire business tonight was probably pan of the graft to get the Socialists chucked out
and leave honest business men safe to make their fortunes out of murder. (Charteris)
9. I'm interested in any number of things, enthusiastic about nothing. (Barth)
10. Ah. me. Everything. I'm afraid, is significant, and nothing is finally important. (Barth)
11. A local busybody, unable to contain her curiosity any longer, asked an expectant mother point-blank
whether she was going to have a baby. '"Oh. goodness, no." the young woman said pleasantly. "I'm just
carrying this for a friend." (Wodehouse)
12. I also assure her that I'm an Angry Young Man. A black humorist. A white Negro. Anything. (Richler)
13. Last time it was a nice, simple. European-style war. (Irving Shaw)