Oxymoron

An oxymoron places two contradictory terms side by side in a single phrase — 'a cheerful funeral', 'deafening silence' — so the contradiction itself carries the meaning.

A cheerful funeral. Two words that should not sit together, and the collision says something neither could say alone: that the occasion was not what it was supposed to be, and that somebody noticed.

The compression is the value. An oxymoron does in two words what a sentence of explanation would do clumsily, and it makes the reader hold both halves at once rather than resolving them.

• An honest swindle.
• A generous refusal.
• A tidy collapse.

Many familiar ones have gone inert — deafening silence, bittersweet, open secret — and a few are only jokes about institutions rather than real figures. A live oxymoron is one where the contradiction is genuinely in the thing being described.

Two neighbours to keep separate. Antithesis sets two opposed ideas in balanced clauses and means both plainly. A paradox is a whole statement that contradicts itself and turns out, on reflection, to be true. An oxymoron is smaller than either: a phrase, usually two words, and its contradiction is not resolved so much as held.

It is conspicuous, which is the usual limit. One per scene, placed where the contradiction is the point, and never as a substitute for showing the thing that made the funeral cheerful.