I welcome additional specimens from Word Ways readers. Natural oxymora Most speakers of English who know the definition of an oxymoron would have little trouble identifying the pairs inside out, student teacher, working vacation and small fortune as oxymora. I submit that the popularity of jumbo shrimp springs in part from an invitation to leap from an apparent meaning to a less-apparent one. This is the stuff that punning is made of, the compacting of two meanings into a verbal space that they do not occupy in ordinary discourse. This process is at work in the likes of even odds, baby grand, cardinal sin, female jock, indoor bleachers and death benefit .
Punning can lurk even in single-word oxymora such as wholesome.
Conversion puns Closely related to the above is a group of oxymoronic pairs that rely on the coexistence of two parts of speech for the same word. Some of my favorites in this small cluster are press release, kickstand, divorce court, building wrecking and White Rose in which the oxymora emerge only with the interpretation of the two words in each pair as verbs. Dead metaphors Over time a word may become emptied of its original meaning. But the draining is so contrived that wicked good should perhaps be assigned to the next category. When we inject our personal values and editorialize unabashedly, we expand our oxymoronic repertoire considerably.