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The first known mention of litotes is in a letter from Cicero in 55 BC . Cicero uses the word to mean simplicity (or frugality) of life. The meaning and the function of the word changed from 'simple' to the idea of understatement that involves double negatives, a way to state things simply. Old Norse had several types of litotes. These points ...
The brigadier, with English understatement, replied: "A bit sticky, things are pretty sticky down there." To American ears, this did not sound desperate, and so he ordered them to stand fast. The surviving Glosters were rescued by a column of tanks; they escaped under fire, sitting on the decks of the tanks. [7]
Understatement often leads to litotes, rhetorical constructs in which understatement is used to emphasize a point. It is a staple of humour in English-speaking cultures. For example, in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, an Army officer has just lost his leg. When asked how he feels, he looks down at his bloody stump and responds, "Stings a bit."
Adianoeta – a phrase carrying two meanings: an obvious meaning and a second, more subtle and ingenious one (more commonly known as double entendre). Alliteration – the use of a series of two or more words beginning with the same letter. Amphiboly – a sentence that may be interpreted in more than one way due to ambiguous structure.
A rhetorical question is a question asked for a purpose other than to obtain information. [1] In many cases it may be intended to start a discourse, as a means of displaying or emphasizing the speaker's or author's opinion on a topic.
For example, the phrase, "John, my best friend" uses the scheme known as apposition. 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").
Because standard English does not have negative concord but many varieties and registers of English do, and because most English speakers can speak or comprehend across varieties and registers, double negatives as collocations are functionally auto-antonymic (contranymic) in English; for example, a collocation such as "ain't nothin" or "not ...
When the meaning of a verb varies for the nouns following it, there is a standard order for the nouns: the noun first takes the most prototypical or literal meaning of the verb and is followed by the noun or nouns taking the less prototypical or more figurative verb meanings. [16]