Litotes?
At 10:30 AM 1/10/2006 -0800, Harry Berger, Jr. wrote:
>Thanks esp. to Dorothy and Andrew for a great exchange. It was short but I
>learned a lot. Made me think again about Sp's uses of the subclasses of
>hyperbole called auxesis and meiosis. Incidentally, what's the opposite of
>hyperbole? I wish it were hypobole, but that's too silly-sounding to be
>true. -h
>
>
>> My thanks to everyone who replied both on and off the list.
>> Andrew, your observations are gorgeous and are surely spot on; I may
>> have to quote you. Spenser's transferred epithets fascinate me partly
>> because their effects in English are more striking than they would be in
>> more highly inflected languages, where freely-floating epithets are a
>> dime a dozen. Spenser seems to have been pleased to find that with this
>> particular figure of speech, the lesser flexibility of his native
>> English was actually a boon. As with allegory itself, the very
>> stubbornness of the material--its reluctance to name what it is
>> naming--becomes a virtue.
>>
>>Dorothy
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