Oxymorons and pleonasms – our very own virtual realities
I was thinking about a photoblog post I did yesterday of a staircase, which I titled, “Stairway up to the sky.” – that’s a pleonasm, right?
I mean if it’s the sky, it’s got to be up, hasn’t it?
I’m in no way a purist in language terms, although I can recognise and appreciate good language usage and I do like that.
We all tend to have certain parasites that leach into our everyday language use – love it or hate it, a lot of it is due to just not taking care, and habit, but can be quite amusing when we sit back and think about it.
We are eager consumers, passively or actively, of both pleonasms and oxymorons – especially as we are bombarded by the advertising industry’s noble quest of deforming all forms of language, whether written or spoken – and they do a good job of it, don’t they.
Some of it is just downright confusing, whilst some is irritating, or at best laughable – but a great deal of it we absorb without question.
There is a great track by The disposable Heroes of Hiphopricy (what a great band) called “Television – the drug of the nation”. It really is a brilliant word-smithy-hip-hop track which vilifies the drug, as they term it, of television.
In this track they mention the use of oxymorons in advertising that is used on tv – citing such examples as “Fresh frozen”, “light but filling” and “virtually spotless”.
I mean, how can it be virtually spotless – it either is or it isn’t spotless and this is largely how oxymorons work. Even the word ‘Oxymoron’ is an oxymoron, ‘Oxy’ meaning keen, sharp, acid and moron, meaning a stupid person – keenly stupid! – is this a joke or something?
You’ve guessed it, an oxymoron is a figure of speech where two contradicting propositions or opposite terms or ideas are combined to create a rhetorical effect by paradoxical means.
Let’s not get lost in this and have a look at some more examples of oxymorons :
Jumbo shrimp – err a shrimp is small isn’t it?
Unexpected surprise – wouldn’t it have to be unexpected in order for it to be a surprise?
Guestimation – you either estimate by calculating using solid data or proven methods or just guess … I would have thought.
Virtual reality – well come on, it’s either virtual or reality, isn’t it?
Accidentally on purpose – yep.
Agree to disagree … err, no …
Unacceptable solution – OK I’ll buy it ….
Genuine imitation wood – only the best …
My very own – err, it’s just my own.
A known secret – ah, yes, I get it.
A deafening silence – What?
Orderly confusion – yeah, I’m confused now.
Confirmed rumour – it’s true.
Awfully nice – lovely!
Pretty ugly – yuk!
Act naturally …
I could go on all day and I hope that you can add to this list through the comments, some are very tongue-in-cheek, whilst others are just non-logical, but we have all heard them and used them at one time or another – they are a feature of language.
Pleonasms, on the other hand, are when we use redundancy in language – as if we’ve won the battle, but we just keep on fighting, adding words, that frankly add nothing in terms of linguistic value – I’ll repeat it again, there is just no value … see what I did there.
Is to “go down below” as on a ship, a pleonasm? As we would have to go down to get below, could just “go below” work without being too ambiguous?
Consider, “Free gifts”, “first introductions” and some people have “Yearly annual meetings.” … every year – I kid you not.
Some examples occur when mixed languages are used, for example when the original word from a foreign language is used by another – “Chai tea” – Chai means tea in Hindi, so it’s Tea-tea … Americans say “Paris France” what? Is there another? Oh yes, in Texas – let’s move on … Ah, yes, there’s “all together”, “end result” and “final finality”, not forgetting “absolutely essential”, “advanced warning” and an “affirmative yes”.
A lot of acronyms are a fertile territory for pleonasms too, such as:
ATM machine, HIV virus, RAM memory, LCD display, ISBN number, PIN number and UPC code.
In some ways, both pleonasms and oxymorons are there to make us think (or not) – well that’s my take on it anyway – bit of a linguistic unexpected surprise that only a wise fool would challenge.
And anyway, both oxymorons and pleonasms are infinitely preferably to double negatives, I don’t know none that are acceptable, and heaven forbid mixed metaphors – we’re just stuck in this habit-rut of churning them out at will …
As Al Gore put it, “A leopard can’t change his stripes”.
Do we need to change the way we learn?
There have been excellent arguments that have promoted the notions of Lifelong Learning (LLL) since the 1950s (see the work of Carl Rogers et al.), but never has the argument for LLL held so much water.
‘Lifelong learning‘ is the “ongoing, voluntary, and self-motivated” pursuit of knowledge for either personal or professional reasons, often when school learning has finished.
Technological change has meant that top jobs that are available today, at the end of 2015, didn’t even exist back in 2005.
But that’s not all.
In universities, students are being prepared for jobs that don’t even exist today, learning to solve problems that don’t yet exist, with technologies that have yet to be invented… Scary, isn’t it!
It has been clear for anyone who lived through the ups and downs of the 1980’s and the ensuing years, that a job for life was something that they would never see.
Portfolio careers were inevitable, along with periods of retraining and adaptation to new markets, technologies and needs dictated by the job market.
Some HR professionals viewed the resulting CVs negatively – different jobs and direction = Instability.
Others viewed it as a sign of resilience and adaptability – today there is little chance that workers will stay for more than 5 years at most in one company and this is set to decrease over the decade.
The first text message was sent on 3 December 1992, when the 22-year-old British engineer Neil Papworth used his computer to wish a “Merry Christmas” to Richard Jarvis, of Vodafone, on his Orbitel 901 mobile phone.
Although a relatively durable technology, it will undoubtedly not see the end of the decade, being overtaken rapidly by microblogging (Twitter, Yammer etc.)
Some will not be in the job that they trained for a few years after university, OK we will probably still have doctors and dentists who remain in their profession (just as well after all that training / learning).
Perhaps the only skills that will have any value, in the relatively near future, are soft skills – learning to learn, and especially the capacity to learn how to learn and change.
As Carl Rogers said, “The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn and change.”
The challenge is for schools and educational establishments to forego the traditional values attached to bodies of knowledge and prepare young (and the less young) people for the future where bodies of knowledge will have a shorter shelf-life.
This would also, pretty much, mean that testing, as a way of ‘checking’ learner’s knowledge, loses ground rapidly, as knowledge gets updated and actualised at an ever-faster pace.
Look around at younger learners, take a look at what they do… naturally.
Their first reflex for them when they need to discover knowledge or factoids is to get onto Google or a social network – they are accustomed to using these tools to find answers.
This, however, does not guarantee any deep learning, but I am starting to question if that is such a bad thing.
Carl Rogers, thoughts on teaching are perhaps more pertinent today, than when he said, “You know that I don’t believe that anyone has ever taught anything to anyone. I question that efficacy of teaching. The only thing that I know is that anyone who wants to learn will learn. And maybe a teacher is a facilitator, a person who puts things down and shows people how exciting and wonderful it is and asks them to eat.”
Do we need to change the way we learn?
I think I will leave you, the reader to decide that for yourself.
Tribute to Jerry Collins Classic All Blacks v Toulon
[embedyt] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmRgM2_0RSI[/embedyt]
The Classic All Blacks took on RC Toulon to help celebrate Collins, who died alongside partner Alana Madill in a car crash in southern France earlier this year.
Players included; Ali Williams, Andrew Hore, Brad Thorn, Carl Hayman,Corey Flyn, Adam Thompson, David Smith, Sitiveni Sivivatu, Rudi Wulf, Dean Budd, Troy Flavell, Ben Atiga, Jason Eaton, Kevin Senio, Chris King, Oren Al’l, Stephen Brett, Saimone Taumoepeau, Hoani Tui, Carlos Spencer, Chris Masoe, Anthony Tuitavake and Justin Marshall took part in the match at Toulon’s Stade Mayol, with an injured Luke McAlister as water boy.
Classic All Blacks Carlos Spencer rugby player
Carlos James Spencer (born 14 October 1975 in Levin) is a former New Zealand rugby union footballer and most recently the head coach of the Eastern Province Kings.
During his playing days, he played at fly-half (first five-eighth) for the Blues and Lions in Super Rugby and for New Zealand internationally.
He has generally specialised in the position of fly-half, also known as “first five-eighth” or “number 10”, although he has also played fullback (number 15) at national and international levels.
Spencer first rose to prominence when he starred alongside Christian Cullen in a Ranfurly Shield challenge in 1991, playing for the Horowhenua team against Auckland. Auckland coach Graham Henry spotted Spencer’s talent and recruited him to play for the Auckland team.
He played for the Blues Super 12 team from the inception of the competition in 1996 until 2005, and for the Auckland NPC side.
In 1996, Carlos Spencer played for the Blues in the first ever Super 12-match, kicking off the professional era of rugby union. He went on to score 608 points for the Blues in the Super Rugby competition.
In 2005 he signed to the English club, Northampton Saints, where he stayed until 30 January 2009.
On 3 February 2009 he signed for Gloucester on a 17-month contract.
In January 2010 Carlos Spencer signed with the Johannesburg-based Golden Lions, to play for the team in the 2010 and 2011 Super Rugby seasons. The contract offered to him was said at the time to be the highest ever in South Africa.
He subsequently took up a coaching role with the team, before being released following the 2012 season.
He moved to the Durban-based Sharks for the 2013 season.
In December 2013, he signed a five-year contract to become the kicking and specialist skills coach at Port Elizabeth-based side, the Eastern Province Kings.
He was appointed as their head coach on 20 February 2014.
He was in charge of just one Currie Cup season in 2014, where they achieved just one victory in ten matches. Brent Janse van Rensburg was appointed as head coach for the 2015 Currie Cup Premier Division season with Carlos Spencer reverting to kicking and specialist skills coach. However, Carlos Spencer left the coaching staff a month later.
In 2006, Spencer was named in the Guinness Premiership Awards Dream Team and collected the Player of the Year award for the 2005–06 season at the Northampton Saints annual awards, as voted for by the clubs fans.
He played in four matches for Bob Dwyer’s World XV team in 2006, including a match for the Barbarians against England at Twickenham on 28 May and a 30-27 loss to the Springboks at Ellis Park on 3 June.
The Classic All Blacks is a rugby union team made up of players from the New Zealand men’s rugby team.
It is not an official national team of New Zealand. First put together in 2007, the team has played Japan three times, English Premiership side Leicester Tigers and ‘classic’ teams from France and Australia.
In 2013 the side played Fiji as part of the Fiji Rugby Union’s centennial anniversary.
On 7 October 2015, the Classic All Blacks played Toulon at the Stade Mayol in a match to honour the late Jerry Collins.
This interview was done on 6th October 2015 after a training session at Stade Mayol, Toulon, prior to the match on the following day, which was a very emotional time for the players who played with Jerry Collins in the past.
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