Question

Urgent help needed!! What's the difference between an oxymoron and juxtaposition?

Answer 1

An oxymoron is when words don't go together and are right beside each other (e.x. Great Depression, Jumbo Shrimp) and a Juxtaposition is when 2 words don't go together but can be separated for more then a paragraph... Hope This Helps
~Rose

Answer 2

Actually, an oxymoron is not just two words that don't belong together. An oxymoron is two contradictory words that have a different meaning when put together. For example, jumbo shrimp.

A juxtaposition is much more complex and has little to do with two words not going together. Like an oxymoron dissimilar or opposite ideas are used for a variety of effects when read from irony to simply creating an image where the reader can draw correlations between the two opposing ideas. For example, Martin Luther King Jr. once said, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." That is juxtaposition, but it does not have to only be ideas. Two characters in a story can be juxtaposed. An example that comes immediately to mind is Oscar Madison and Felix Unger from Neil Simon's The Odd Couple. Those characters are a blatant juxtaposition, an more subtle one would be Ebenezer Scrooge and Mr. Fezziwig. What I mean by blatant and subtle is that Simon wrote The Odd Couple purposefully to make juxtaposition the center of the story, whereas wingspanens simply used juxtaposition to show the contrast between Scrooge and his more gentile former employer to elicit an emotional response from the reader.

So in a nutshell, oxymorons are two or more words with opposing meanings that when put together mean something else often ironically like canned fresh. A juxtaposition is two opposing ideas, characters, scenes, etc. that a writer puts together side by side for a variety of effects ranging from irony to comedy or to simply cause the reader to contrast and or compare and draw certain conclusions from that comparison.