No doubt inspired by my 4/29/20 posting “Magritte by Banksy”, Mark Mandel commented yesterday on my 8/19/17 posting “Magrittean disavowals”:
I have never — well, not for many years — considered the “Magrittean disavowal” in “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”
(#1)
at all paradoxical. It’s quite accurate. That is not a pipe, but rather a painting of a pipe.
It’s a shame that the technical term oxymoron has come to be used for a figure of speech involving an apparent contradiction, since etymologically it’s ‘sharp’ + ‘foolish’ and would be just the label we’d want for claims like Mark’s above: superficially clever, but deeply foolish.
