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Understatement – a form of irony, sometimes in the form of litotes, in which something is represented as less than it really is, with the intent of drawing attention to and emphasizing the opposite meaning. Universal audience – an audience consisting of all humankind. Utterance – statement that could contain meaning about one's own person.
Hyperbole is one of the most widely recognized and used forms of figurative language in everyday life. It is used heavily in advertising and entertainment. Advertisers use hyperbole to exaggerate the benefits of products to boost sales. Repetitive hyperbole is used in public relations to increase the popularity of a person or product. It is ...
Exaggeration is the representation of something as more extreme or dramatic than it is, intentionally or unintentionally. It can be a rhetorical device or figure of speech , used to evoke strong feelings or to create a strong impression.
Tropes (from Greek trepein, 'to turn') change the general meaning of words. An example of a trope is irony, which is the use of words to convey the opposite of their usual meaning ("For Brutus is an honorable man; / So are they all, all honorable men"). During the Renaissance, scholars meticulously enumerated and classified figures of speech.
In rhetoric, a rhetorical device, persuasive device, or stylistic device is a technique that an author or speaker uses to convey to the listener or reader a meaning with the goal of persuading them towards considering a topic from a perspective, using language designed to encourage or provoke an emotional display of a given perspective or action.
This type of language is very often made vague to more effectively invoke an emotional response and/or exploit stereotypes. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 3 ] Loaded words and phrases have significant emotional implications and involve strongly positive or negative reactions beyond their literal meaning .
In law, puffery is usually invoked as a defense argument: it identifies futile speech, typically of a seller, which does not give rise to legal liability. In a circular manner, legal explanations for this normative position describe the non-enforceable speech as a statement that no " reasonable person " would take seriously anyway.
In the former too much is made of little; in the latter one is led to expect much, but with too little result. The two appear to converge in William Caxton 's translation of the fable (1484), where he makes of the mountain " a hylle whiche beganne to tremble and shake by cause of the molle whiche delved it ". [ 4 ]