Litotes for hypobole? Not an insignificant response. Not inadequate.
Not unright. But.........
>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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