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Understatement is an expression of lesser strength than what the speaker or writer actually means or than what is normally expected. It is the opposite of embellishment or exaggeration, and is used for emphasis, irony, hedging, or humor. A particular form of understatement using negative syntax is called litotes.
The French actress Sarah Bernhardt was considered insufficiently understated in English terms. Photograph by Félix Nadar, c. 1864. This attitude of understatement was exemplified by a comment upon Sarah Bernhardt's violent depiction of Cleopatra in the 1891 play of that title: "How different, how very different, from the home life of our own dear Queen!"
Samuel Johnson gives as an example the sentence, "Bolingbroke was a holy man" (he was anything but). [24] [25] Verbal irony is sometimes also considered to encompass various other literary devices such as hyperbole and its opposite, litotes, conscious naïveté, and others. [26] [27]
In rhetoric, litotes (/ l aɪ ˈ t oʊ t iː z, ˈ l aɪ t ə t iː z /, US: / ˈ l ɪ t ə t iː z /), [1] also known classically as antenantiosis or moderatour, is a figure of speech and form of irony in which understatement is used to emphasize a point by stating a negative to further affirm a positive, often incorporating double negatives for effect.
Paraprosdokian – a sentence in which the latter half takes an unexpected turn. Parataxis – using juxtaposition of short, simple sentences to connect ideas, as opposed to explicit conjunction. Parenthesis – an explanatory or qualifying word, clause, or sentence inserted into a passage that is not essential to the literal meaning.
Coined by Dr. Jeffrey Karp, Ph.D, a professor of biomedical engineering at Brigham & Women's Hospital Harvard Medical School in Boston, the pendulum lifestyle is defined as a "concept that ...
Internal rhyme: using two or more rhyming words in the same sentence. Litotes: an understatement achieved by negating the opposite statement, such as "not too bad" for "very good", or "she is not a beauty queen" for "she is ugly", yielding an ironical effect. Onomatopoeia: word that imitates a real sound (e.g. tick-tock or boom).
In linguistics and grammar, a sentence is a linguistic expression, such as the English example "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog."In traditional grammar, it is typically defined as a string of words that expresses a complete thought, or as a unit consisting of a subject and predicate.