After an obscenely long conversation that had nothing to do with anything, actually…. my family and I (at a one of our many social gatherings) started thinking about the twists and turns of verbal communication.  Shocker.  It’s one of those few times when one too many cocktails leads to mindless rantings, but of course, this got me thinking with a strange amount of off-kilter curiosity. 

Oxymoron was the topic of conversation.  It’s the believable fallacy, clear as mud, good morning, the palest night, bittersweet, refreshingly unattractive, clearly confused, and the wickedly pleasant that my mind wraps around while trying to decode the illogical compatibility within such deliberately structured phrases.  I’m babbling but when someone, (who shall remain nameless) blurted out, “He was useful in a helpless sort of way, ya know.” 

It just made me laugh.

“Usefully helpless?”  I asked, quizzically.

“Yeah, because if he had actually done anything–the forty-second time I’d asked him–then I’d be forced to call him helpfully useless.”      

Hmmm.