In this Dinosaur Comics strip, T-Rex complains that the phrase “a whale of a good time” has been “ruined by people making the obvious stupid joke”:
In other words, the phrase started out as a metaphor that could describe any kind of “good time” whose magnitude was sufficiently whale-like, but no one ever seems to use it except to make a pun about settings involving actual whales. (He also mentions “dog-gone great,” presumably implying that it’s only used in the context of actual dogs.)
Has this happened to any other phrases? The only one I can think of immediately is “that’s using your head!”: I’ve never heard it used to mean “good thinking!”, but only as an “obvious stupid joke” after someone physically uses their head to do something (e.g., scoring a goal in a soccer game).
Apparently the “little joke” has whooshed you. The point is to imply that the first word “military” inherently contradicts the second word “intelligence”, which obviously parallels the original narrow definition of an oxymoron.
The term oxymoron has long since broadened beyond the original narrow meaning as a rhetorical device:
A more general meaning of “contradiction in terms” (not necessarily for rhetoric effect) is recorded by the OED for 1902.
And there is an entire section in the Wikipedia oxymoron article on this specific type of joke:
“Comical oxymoron” is a term for the claim, for comical effect, that a certain phrase or expression is an oxymoron (called “opinion oxymorons” by Lederer (1990). The humour derives from implying that an assumption (which might otherwise be expected to be controversial or at least non-evident) is so obvious as to be part of the lexicon. An example of such a “comical oxymoron” is “educational television”: the humour derives entirely from the claim that it is an oxymoron by the implication that “television” is so trivial as to be inherently incompatible with “education”…
Examples popularized by comedian George Carlin include “military intelligence”…and “business ethics”
No. Sure it is a little joke. But it is not an oxymoron. A comical oxymoron is not an oxymoron. mind you sure, when Carlin said it, it was funny.
But it is just a joke, and a sadly overused one now.
If someone didn’t know what a real oxymoron was, they would have to assume it means "a comical turn of phrase with jokingly opposites that really aren’t.
These are both totally inappropriate. You are the one who is trying to hijack a perfectly cromulent thread by making a fuss about your understanding of the word “oxymoron”. Your initial post is only barely on-topic, and now you are attacking other posters.
Drop the hijack. And if you can’t post constructively, leave the thread.
I’m 63, so no kid. My grandparents’ speech was peppered with those sorts of colloquialisms. My parents used lines like that a bit. I don’t. And most of my contemporaries don’t. IMO/IME the speech of the 40- & 20-somethings seems equally devoid of this.
To be sure, there are still plenty of catchphrases and idioms in US English. But IMO not the sort the OP is asking about.
Now having said that, I hang out with a crowd that speaks in a fairly high register. The crowd at a truckstop in Nebraska might have a lot more of that in their speech.
Gotta agree with the above, these phrases weren’t ruined by obvious jokes, the obvious joked resulted when the phrases became obsolete. They would sound odd and out of place in ordinary speech, so the joke is a good way to cover for talking like grandpa.
Said another way, if you’re trying to make a rhetorical joke where you want to sound grandpa-ish, trotting out one of these lame trite anachronisms is a great way to set that tone.
e.g.:
You can noodle for catfish in a rising river. I think noodling for most eel species would result in lost fingers. Although sushi is usually made with rice, not noodles.
