There are thousands of figures of
speech. Almost everything that a person may
say has a term to describe it, often of Greek derivation and known only to a
handful of grammarians and rhetoricians, as well as high school students during
their once in a lifetime pilgrimage to the shrine of proper English. It is in turns impressive and insufferable to
not only know terms like “anaphora” or “litotes” but also to be able to give
clever little examples of their use, but it will not generate a lot of free
beer at the local bar.
One figure is universal to all
languages and to the human condition.
Hyperbole, the classic overstatement of exaggeration, can be found from
our first declarations (“You never buy me candy!”) to our final breaths (“The
rest is silence!”). I think it is a very
human response to pretend to expand our own importance in a world over which we
have shockingly little control.
For most of us, our first
awareness of the word, “hyperbole” comes in grammar class in the ninth or tenth
grade. The word sneaks in with all the
other Greek mouthfuls that our instructors try in vain to teach us, but I think
it lasts with many of us for two reasons.
First, it is the easiest to remember – a word that sounds well to
describe something we all understand, making it almost unique among grammatical
terms. The second reason is that around
the same time we learn the English class version, we are also taught a Mathematical
variant. Out of the morass of arcane
geometric terms comes the “hyperbola” – a sort of crowning version of the
boring arc of a parabola. In fact both words
are from the same Greek root, leading to even more confusion with the adjective
“hyperbolic.” For once we need to
remember what class we are sitting in.
All crises pass. Few of us have need for either of these words in
our daily parlance. We may see
hyperbolae (the math variety) all around us but the only part of us that
remembers what they
are called is the cringing shadow of our prepubescent memories. We, as humans, exaggerate in a constant
stream, but we only recall the Greek name for our bold expostulations if we are
editing or trying to win a bet.
Which is a shame, really, because
names do have power. The act of
identifying a statement as a figure of speech allows us to master it. Not all paper tissues are Kleenex and realizing
that we have experienced synecdoche reminds us that variety is the spice of
life. People who answer their own
questions (“Where have all the flowers gone?
Young girls have picked them, every one.”) are not be shunned as crazy
or arrogant, but recognized as devotees of hypophora.
No matter how bold or brazen the
exaggeration, by exposing the hyperbole we can shrink the statement down to a
manageable size.
I remember the first North
Carolina State Fair that my son (then seven) and I attended. The very concept of a State Fair is
hyperbolic in its implication that the entire state is involved, but we’ll
leave that point aside. The midway is a
sea of exaggeration, full of improbable and impossible promises – wonders of the
world and never-before-seen treasures magically transported there just for our
benefit.
We poised before the ticket booth
below a sign boasting the World’s Smallest Horse. My son read the words and looked up at
me. “Dad,” he asked, “how do they know?”
Hyperbole tamed.
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