An Inadvertent Oxymoron

From an article on the suspicious deaths of a pair of children, we have this beauty:

“The circumstances surrounding the death of the two children had various similarities,” Wilcox said in a statement emailed to the News-Leader. [Emphasis added]

Various, from variety, implies many different. Literally, you can’t have varied similarities without risking the delicate balance between existence and non-existence in our fragile universe.

Unfortunately, various has been abstracted to mean nothing more than many or several in the argot.

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