What is an oxymoron?

An oxymoron pairs contradictory words for effect, usually as an adjective and noun or two adjacent terms: deafening silence, bittersweet, living dead, jumbo shrimp, seriously funny, alone together. The point is not error but compression, since the collision produces a meaning neither word carries alone. Shakespeare used them heavily, and Romeo's string of them in describing love as a heavy lightness and a cold fire is the standard classroom example. The word itself is self-demonstrating, coming from Greek roots meaning sharp and dull.

Two neighbors get confused with it. A paradox is a statement rather than a phrase, appearing self-contradictory while containing truth, as in the observation that the more you learn the more you realize you do not know. A contradiction in terms is a genuine logical impossibility with no intended effect, such as a square circle. The popular usage in which someone calls a phrase like military intelligence or business ethics an oxymoron is a joke asserting that the two concepts are incompatible, which is rhetorical rather than a use of the literary device.

Worth noting that many common examples are only apparent contradictions once you attend to the senses of the words. Jumbo shrimp works because shrimp names a species rather than a size, and virtual reality contradicts only if virtual is read as unreal rather than as functionally equivalent. That is part of the interest: an oxymoron often exposes that a word carries more than one sense, and the pleasure of a good one is the momentary friction before the reader resolves it. In writing, they land best used sparingly, since a paragraph of them reads as a stunt rather than as precision.