Larry Swanson’s Blog

A massage client the other day referred to the “disco nap,” a quick 40 winks after work and before you head out for the night. This got me thinking about other kinds of naps. There’s the “cat nap,” the “power nap,” the siesta - and that’s about all I have come up with so far. I know there must be others that I’m missing. If you can thinkof other kinds of naps please add a comment to this post and let me know.

Listening to Anu Garg of Wordsmith.org on KUOW this morning, I was reminded of a word that I coined a while back: oxymoronym. Conflate oxymoron, which means a phrase of two contradictory terms (like “jumbo shrimp” or “pretty ugly”), with the -nym suffix (as in homonym or synonym), and you get oxymoronym, a word whose meaning is the opposite of its presentation (length, pronunciation, etc.). For example, vast or instantaneously.