Just yesterday I was contentedly grazing on the conversations taking place around me at the coffee shop when I heard the phrase “a Nazi moron” from the table next to me. “Woohoo!” thinks I, “here's something juicy at last about which to blog.” I have to say it was from an unexpected quarter. as I had earlier pegged the two guys at the next table as fairly innocuous “gentlemen of the second declension.”
“Hmm,” thinks I. “Maybe one of them is the target of anti-gay discrimination from some lantern-jawed conservative jerkoff1 at work. Or maybe they're talking about an old grade school crony who was in the AAA School Safety Patrol. Or maybe they are simply referring to one of the people who supported the smoking ban in St. Paul.” If the last case was true, I fancied I could teach them some more succinct phrases to use.
Seconds later I realized that they had said, not “a Nazi moron,” but rather “an oxymoron.” The nice thing about this mistake is that the first phrase is the opposite of an oxymoron – it is a redundancy. A less desirable characteristic is that this makes for a much shorter blog entry than I had anticipated. So much for the visions of sugarplums with razor blades in them dancing in my head. Oh well.
I love words, even ones I mishear or misread.
This entry's title of course comes from here.
-- Hulles
1I can't believe I just added “jerkoff” to my word processor dictionary. Note that I prefer my jerkoffs unhyphenated. That way, they don't get to have a bar mitzvah.
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