Oxymoronica: Paradoxical Wit &amp; Wisdom From History's Greatest Wordsmiths
Coining the titular word to describe quotations that contain seemingly self-contradictory elements, psychologist and amateur wordsmith Grothe (Never Let a Fool Kiss You or a Kiss Fool You) gathers hundreds of examples&#x97;ancient, modern and everything in between&#x97;of such sayings. From Confucius&#x92;s "Real knowledge is to know the extent of one&#x92;s own ignorance" to Yogi Berra&#x92;s "Nobody goes there anymore. It&#x92;s too crowded" to Adrienne Rich&#x92;s "Marriage is lonelier than solitude," these bon mots offer pithy insights and sometimes clever advice. Grothe&#x92;s 14 chapters group the quotations by theme; in "Sex, Love, and Romance," for example, Louise Colet advises readers to "Doubt the man who swears to his devotion," while in "Oxymoronic Insults (and a Few Compliments)," Henry James reflects that George Eliot is "magnificently ugly&#x85;. in this vast ugliness resides a most powerful beauty which, in a very few minutes, steals forth and charms the mind." Potentially useful to public speakers and certainly bound to amuse word mavens, Grothe&#x92;s collection is good clean fun&#x97;with a bit of an edge: the last section offers "Inadvertent Oxymoronica," in which George W. Bush is quoted as saying "One of the common denominators I have found is that expectations rise above that which is expected."Copyright &copy; Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.