Gerund and Oxymoron

In the film History Boys, one of the teenage boys knowingly asks if a certain word was a gerund.  I knew it was a part of speech, but made a note to look it up.  Grammar Bytes provided the answer.  (Grammar Bytes' URL is chompchomp.com and, when I accessed it, displayed the head of a roaring gorilla.

So now, I've set a minor task for myself: to listen for gerunds.  All gerunds end in "ing", so, if I understand what I've read, it's a matter of distinguishing gerunds from present participles in which those same terms act as modifiers instead of nouns.

This reminded me of  a story from a student at Classical High School in Providence, Rhode Island.  He said his English instructor asked his students to cringe each time they heard an oxymoron, e.g., bittersweet.  I decided to verify that I still knew what an oxymoron is.

A quick look in Wikipedia turned up a several oxymorons I hear frequently: "objective opinion", "original copy", and "definite possibility".  It is only having seen it pointed out that it strikes me how we/I accept statements without question.  (I perhaps less than most, but still, I stand guilty as charged.)

"Original copy" seems to be valid, especially now that documents are created on laser printers.  What is the difference between the first copy printed, and the second copy printed?  The original might be bits in memory which was never stored on disk.  Or it could be on disk.  If two copies are printed at the same time, is one the original and the other a copy?

The two which had obvious reference to computer science were "virtual reality" and "constant variable". The first case seems appropriate. In the second, computer scientists have created computer languages to resolve the ambiguity.

A variable name is created to let the computer program store information. In some languages (and in some cases some incarnations of the same language) the language has no way to tell the computer that the data should not be allowed to change, i.e., that the variable is a constant. In other languages it can be explicit, the term constant is part of the declaration or the data type, e.g., a tuple in Pythonare immutable. (I just learned this.)