Oxymoron is oxymoronic

oxymoron / ahk-si-mo-rahn / noun

A phrase or compound word containing two words that are ostensibly semantic opposites, such as "a long brief" or "hot ice."

Linguist Robert Beard: The adjective for this word is oxymoronic and the adverb oxymoronically. Try using the pedantic plural oxymora instead of oxymorons; it really impresses people.

Oxymoron, Beard writes, is most appropriately an oxymoron itself; it least it was in Greek. 

Greek oxymoron is made up of oxys "sharp, acid" and moros "dull, stupid", the source of the English word moron. Greek oxys is also found in oxygen. It is akin to Latin acus "needle", whose root we see in acute, acuity, and acupuncture. 

The original Proto-Indo-European root ak- "needle" came to the Germanic languages as something like agjo, which developed into Old Norse eggja "to needle, egg on". During one of the friendly Viking visits to England from the 9th through the 11th centuries, English borrowed this word for its verb to egg (on). The word was already in English, but with a different pronunciation: today's edge.

 Those Vikings were fun-loving guys.

Make writer's block work for you

"Writer’s block is a tool — use it. When asked why you haven’t produced anything lately, just say, “I’m blocked.” Since most people think that writing is some mystical process where characters “talk to you” and you can hear their voices in your head, being blocked is the perfect cover for when you just don’t feel like working. The gods of creativity bless you, they forsake you, it’s out of your hands and whatnot. Writer’s block is like “We couldn’t get a baby sitter” or “I ate some bad shrimp,” an excuse that always gets you a pass. The electric company nagging you for money, your cell provider harassing you, whatever — just say, “I’m blocked,” and you’re off the hook. 

"But don’t overdo it. In the same way the baby-sitter bit loses credibility when your kids are in grad school, there’s an expiration date. After 20 years, you might want to mix it up. Throw in an Ellisonian “My house caught fire and burned up my opus.” The specifics don’t matter — the important thing is to figure out what works for you."

-- Colson Whitehead

Look for an editor, writer

If you’re in doubt about the role serendipity plays consider the curious case of Thomas Wolfe, Jason Gots writes.

His Look Homeward, Angel, among the most critically acclaimed novels in American history, almost never got published. In 1927, the original manuscript appeared in the office of Maxwell Perkins, an editor at Scribners. It filled six cardboard boxes and was a non-linear, experimental attempt to capture “the strange and bitter magic of life.” The writing was powerfully poetic – a bold new voice – but the book was a sprawling, tangled mess.

Any other editor would have passed on the project as hopelessly unmarketable. Had the book been published in its original form, it would likely have been dismissed by critics as promising yet unreadable. But Perkins saw something in it, and was an editor of unusual energy and creativity. After a protracted, fierce (yet good-natured) battle with Wolfe over every word, sentence, and paragraph, he completely restructured the novel and cut the manuscript by 66,000 words, co-producing a literary classic and launching Wolfe’s career.

Look Homeward, Angel was the outpouring of a passionate, obsessive soul. Its genius lay in Wolfe’s ability to translate the ebb and flow of his powerful intellect into a new kind of lyrical prose – or perhaps more accurately, in his inability not to. A more market-savvy author might have crafted a better-constructed book on her own, but it wouldn’t have possessed the idiosyncratic beauty and power that makes Wolfe’s epic endure.

Those editors don't exist anymore.

Hand me that datum there, would you?

So is data plural or singular? The Wall Street Journal has declared itself in this matter, as The Economist notes:

Most style guides and dictionaries have come to accept the use of the noun data with either singular or plural verbs, and we hereby join the majority. 

As usage has evolved from the word’s origin as the Latin plural of datum, singular verbs now are often used to refer to collections of information: Little data is available to support the conclusions. 

Otherwise, generally continue to use the plural: Data are still being collected. 

(As a singular/plural test, try to substitute statistics for data: It doesn’t work in the first case — little statistics is available — so the singular is fails to pass muster. The substitution does work in the second case — statistics are still being collected – so the plural are passes muster.)

 You need quite a bit of staminum to keep this agendum alive.

What new words say about society

"The language most likely to continue long without alteration, would be that of a nation raised a little, and but a little, above barbarity, secluded from strangers, and totally employed in procuring the conveniencies of life; wither without books, or, like some of the Mahometan countries, with very few: men thus busied and unlearned, having only such words as common use requires, would perhaps long continue to express the same notions by the same signs.

"But no such constancy can be expected in a people polished by arts, and classed by subordination, where one part of the community is sustained and accommodated by the labour of the other. Those who have much leisure to think, will always be enlarging the stock of ideas, and every increase of knowledge, whether real or fancied, will produce new words, or combinations of words. When the mind is unchained from necessity, it will range after convenience; when it is left at large in the fields of speculation, it will shift opinions; as any custom is disused, the words that expressed it must perish with it; as any opinion grows popular, it will innovate speech in the same proportion as it alters practice."

-- Samuel Johnson

(Johnson)