Having taught all Core Elementary and Middle School Subjects (including Grammar, Spelling, and Writing, as part of our Language Arts Curriculum) in the Jamestown Public Schools in my career, one day at home when Chasy was about 6 years old, a Campbell Soup commercial came on TV and finished with their slogan of that time, “Soup is Good Food.” When she saw the words and heard the slogan, she asked why “good” and “food” didn’t rhyme. In my classroom, many times, I had students who wanted to know the same about words like rough, cough, through, and though, and other words like them, all ending in the same letters yet those words don’t always sound the same at the end. It went the other way too, how some words that don’t have common endings, do rhyme with each other.

There were also some “rules” of grammar we taught to students starting at very early ages, like “i” before “e” except after “c,” and when two vowels go walking,” the first one does the talking,” both of which have exceptions of fairly significant percentages, in the study of Language Arts. There are also words that are spelled the same but are pronounced differently and have different meanings (homographs). An example of these words falls into the statement, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t get him to write with a lead pencil.” (I know all you Felix Unger followers, that it’s actually graphite, but for the purpose of this narrative, I’ll use the word lead.)

Whenever they asked me why there were so many inconsistencies in the English Language, my response was, “Because that’s the way it is,” and then I followed up with, “Don’t try and figure the English Language out, just try to learn it the best you can.”

Our language is a tough one to figure out, not only in the above situations, but also, learning when a “g”, and/or “c” is soft or hard, or when a vowel is short or long, or when do you add an “s” or “es” or change the “y” to “I” and then add an “es,” or when certain words ending in “ey” only need an “s” to create the plural, or when you have to double the consonant at the end of a word before adding the “es” to make it plural.

Then there are words that have multiple uses, and multiple meanings, and words that can be spelled differently but sound the same way and mean different things (to-too-two, cent-scent, there-their-they’re, etc.).

When someone asks another if they speak English, the person being asked might respond by asking back, “Which English are you talking about?” Then we get into similes and metaphors, idioms and adages, diagraming sentences (remember doing that?), verb conjugations and tenses, interjections, participles (and dangling participles), and those statements that contradict themselves, those being called oxymorons, and that’s where this piece is heading.

It’s time for another test of English 101 testing your knowledge of, and/or remembering, a number of seemingly contradictory statements that we have been asked to learn and understand as part of the acceptance of our native language. The VFTB thought it might be on par with some of the other tests of information learned and presented in this forum, to offer a number of incomplete oxymorons testing your ability to fill in the missing parts, before or after, to complete the confusing statements.

As always, answers will be given when it’s all over, for your self-correction, and finding your score. Good luck!

Deafening…

Alone…

Original…

…Shrimp

… as Hell.

Same…

…Dead

Found…

Exact…

Definite…

…Towel

Working…

…Odds

Extinct…

Living…

Recorded…

Freezer…

Pretty…

Random…

…Teacher

True…

…Sorrow

Clearly…

…Reality

…Sweet

There are 25 pretty common oxymorons used often in speech and writing. There are many other genres of oxymorons we encounter in our daily life, one of them being music, so your bonus question asks for the song title (an obvious oxymoron) of a hit record performed by a singing duo once called Tom and Jerry. Correctly answering of question will earn you an extra 5 point bonus added to your score. Here are your 4 point each answers:

Silence

Together

Copy

Jumbo

Cold

Difference

Living

Found

Estimate

Maybe

Paper

Vacation

Even

Life

Sacrifices

Live

Burn

Ugly

Order

Student

Lies

Sweet

Confusing

Virtual

Bitter

And that brings us to the Bonus Question about the oxymoron sung by Tom and Jerry, A.K.A. Simon and Garfunkel, which became a huge hit titled The Sounds of Silence. If you got that one correct, you get the 5 bonus points.

Hope you had fun with this one, and if all this seems confusing, imagine how confusing it is for our younger kids in school to understand the language they speak. Maybe that’s why they text in that particular language. (I venture a guess, it might even be easier, for them, than the English we try to teach them in school.) Regardless, when getting confused, yourself, by some of our English rules, words, and phrases, etc., heed the advice I gave to my students way back when, “Don’t try to figure the English Language out, just try to learn (and understand it.? Don’t worry so much about that one), but just accept it the best that you can.”