What are your personal oxymorons? (Yeah, yeah, "oxymora" for you pedants out there)

Reading another blogger's post on irony and paradox, I was reminded of a particular type of paradox: the oxymoron. An oxymoron is defined as "a figure of speech in which apparently contradictory terms appear in conjunction”. The most commonly cited example seems to be Tennyson's "faith unfaithful kept him falsely true”.

Sometimes, however, phrases are labelled oxymoronic for humorous effect, the most well-known, perhaps, being "military intelligence".

So in response to Robert Hruzek’s group writing project, “What I learned from laughter”, I'm taking a break from whinging about bad corporatese to present a light-hearted but highly revealing list of my personal oxymorons.

What did I learn? That I’m still an old curmudgeon. That – amazingly – I grew up to be the coolest kid in the class. That I like food more than I like children. And that I better not find myself with a black marker pen near any corporate art. Read on . . .

Skiing holiday I’m sorry, but any holiday that requires you to spend most of your time a) cold and b) engaged in near-frictionless travel down a big slippy-slidey hill is not a holiday – it’s torture.

It’s particularly not a holiday when taken en masse, as so many skiing trips are these days. Being the only person in a large group of your peers who is rubbish at engaging in near-frictionless travel down a big slippy-slidey hill is just a cruel reminder of school sports. I guess at least this time round I have the option of spending all day sipping margaritas in the jacuzzi. (Hey, it turns out I was the cool one at school after all!)

Sports news The content of your typical sports report is this: “Group of not-very-bright men kick round object into square object more times than other group of not-very-bright men”. And this is on the Today programme because . . . ?

Street art If it’s in the street it’s not art – it’s graffiti.

That’s not an insult, by the way. Give me gloriously grubby Rome – where every other ancient monument sports some anarchist scrawl – over the sanitised streets of London, any day. Besides, by way of art, the latter are invariably decorated with anodyne works of corporate nonsense commissioned by some large developer as an unwanted gift to the local community in return for a shameless land grab.

(Yes, Land Securities, I am talking about that rubbish stripy panel you’ve put under the bridge at Blackfriars in London’s SE1. At what point did you not realise it looked like a carrier bag from Paul Smith? Or was this a deliberate attempt to attract high-end retail into those buildings of breathtakingly inhumane scale that you’ve thrown up nearby).

Child-friendly restaurant If it’s child-friendly, it’s not a restaurant. It’s a nursery that happens to sell mediocre food. Unless you’re in Italy, of course, where all the children are restaurant friendly – i.e. they can sit still for the duration of a meal without crying when presented with garlicky stuff, food that still has a face attached to it, and tentacles that were still twitching only minutes before they hit the plate.

Folk music I can’t say it better than one of my heroes: “There’s a reason folk music is so bad – it was written by the people.” Thank you, Tom Lehrer.

So, I've fessed up to my gripes and prejudices - what are your personal oxymorons?

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