paradox is a statement or situation that appears self-contradictory or absurd yet expresses a truth — or, in the stricter logical sense, one that genuinely cannot be resolved at all.
Those are two different things, and they are worth keeping apart. A rhetorical paradox only looks contradictory: "the more you give away, the more you have" dissolves the moment the two senses of have are separated, and the apparent contradiction is exactly what makes the line stick. A logical paradox does not dissolve. The liar's sentence — "this statement is false" — comes out true if false and false if true, and no reading escapes; paradoxes of that kind have forced real revisions in set theory and semantics rather than yielding to a clever reframe.
English took the word in the sixteenth century from the Greek paradoxon, "contrary to expectation," built from para-, "beyond," and doxa, "opinion." The etymology names the mechanism: a paradox is defined against what the listener already assumes, so what reads as paradoxical depends on the assumptions in the room.
📝Meticulously Ridiculous and 📝Capitalistic Altruism are worked examples of the rhetorical kind — pairings whose halves look opposed until the frame holding both of them comes into view.