Showing posts with label oxymoron. Show all posts
Showing posts with label oxymoron. Show all posts

Thursday, June 13, 2013

Oxymoronic Obscurantism


The meeting on a wet afternoon closes…

Got time for a coffee?
Have another meeting. Syllabus reform.
Virtue.
Reluctant virtue.
Hmm. Oxymoron.
Pardon?
Contradiction of terms. Like a speedy sloth. A practical idealist. Or a casual fanatic.

___________
Voice-over
Joyful cynics seldom routinely see colorless green ideas sleeping furiously.

See Wiki Dictionary entry for Oxymoron.
...

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Endangered Weeds


Swan Plant aka Milkweed
Greenfinger and Bluetooth walk around the garden.
Weeds. Milkweed. See? Break the stem and milk comes out.
You’ve got another kind of milkweed over here. Swan plants.
That’s for the butterflies.
Swan plant is also called milkweed. Asclepias fruiticosa. There’s heaps of plants in the Asclepias genus.
Asclepias?
After the Greek god of medicine, Asclepius.

________________
Voice-over
They name WEEDS after me? 
I'm HONORED.
“Weed” is a subjective expression. Implying something of an invasive nature.
Something invasive can scarcely be called “endangered.”
Is “endangered weed” thus an oxymoron?
To developers unsympathetic to biodiversity, any plant could be a weed.
I propose a new new category to counter the depredations of human commerce.
Endangered weeds.

Milkweeds, a big family, 140 described. Noted for nectar, butterfly gardening, flowers. They have a surprising number of human uses too: medicinal, insulation, sweetening, cords, rubber.