Meiosis (figure of speech)
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
In rhetoric, meiosis is a euphemistic figure of speech that intentionally understates something or implies that it is lesser in significance or size than it really is. Meiosis is the opposite of auxesis, and also sometimes used as a synonym for litotes The term is derived from the Greek mei-o-o (“to make smaller”, "to diminish").
[edit]
Examples
- "The Troubles" as a name for decades of violence in Northern Ireland.
- A lawyer defending a schoolboy who has set fire to his school might call the act of arson a "prank", in this case using meiosis in an attempt to diminish the significance of the act (actually, grand arson) to the level of a harmless joke or minor act of vandalism.
- "The Recent Unpleasantness," used in the southern United States as an idiom to refer to the American Civil War and its aftermath
[edit]
See also
Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Meiosis (figure of speech)" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.
