I knew we could coax a top linguistics student into this:

Here's another oxymoron that might be more interesting:

"I am a lazy gett, she is as pure as the cold driven snow"

but it depends on an interpretation of 'driven' as driven through, or maybe driven away, as an outcast?  This is iffy and probably has to do with my original mishearing of 'cold' as 'coal', i.e. perfect snow that has been blackened by human traffic.  A point in my favor: snow is such a cliched image for purity, he must have meant to use it in a new way. Otherwise, what does 'driven' have to do with purity, unless it's purity of the repressed or frigid sort, not innocence.

I don't see what you mean here, Youn. Isn't 'cold driven snow' just a stock phrase? It might sound odd, but I'm pretty sure lots of people use it. It's kind of poetic, as cliches go. I always assumed it meant 'driven' in the sense of a blizzard that 'drives' down hard. But I have to say I was never quite sure.

But aren't tautologies supposed to be literally tautological?  Then it's contingent on either interpretation of 'or'.  But this isn't taking into account the meaning of 'could'.  It's a tautology with a wide scope reading for the modal, which is justified because 'either' follows it, unless you don't believe it's possible for anyone to be successful.  And say that we mean something is possible if it is at all possible.

Oh dear, I give up. Would anyone with a a higher IQ than me like to join the fray? Incidentally, I am aware that this thread might strike some of you as wanky in the extreme. You may be right and you may be wrong. Even more incidentally, my Exeter City tautology wasn't very good because they could always draw. Unless it was a cup match. Yes, that's what I meant all along. So incidentally it hurts, the other day I was watching the Simpsons and found Homer talking about monkey butlers. Might this be the root of the gnomic reference on back of the new album? Or have I just led a sheltered life and everyone else is talking about monkey butlers all the time? N. xx +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the undead Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. WWW: http://www.missprint.org/sinister +-+ "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "tech-heads and students" +-+ +-+ "the cardie wearing biscuit nibbling belle & sebastian list" +-+ +-+ "sinsietr is a bit freaky" - stuart david, looper +-+ +-+ "pasty-faced vegan geeks... and we LOST!" - NME April 2000 +-+ +-+ "peculiarly deranged fanbase" "frighteningly named +-+ +-+ Sinister List organisation" - NME May 2000 +-+ +----------------------------------------------------------------------+