Bunker Mulligan "Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry." ~Mark Twain

I don’t know how I ended up at this web site, but the book looked very interesting to me. So, I went out and bought it today.

I’ve always been interested in the origins of words and phrases, and the numerous meanings of any given English word. Americans adopt all kinds of words from other languagues, so I probably should have said American word.

Oxymoron has an interesting etymology. In ancient Greece oxus meant “sharp; pointed” and moros meant “dull; stupid; foolish.” So the word oxymoron is itself an oxymoron, literally meaning something like “a sharp dullness” or “pointed foolishness.”

This should be a fun read in the same way as Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, an exploration of thought.