Dating him isn’t all bad, she thought. It could be worse
He’s no Adonis, and he doesn’t quite fit in his shirts.
He could tidy up more and his cooking could be better.
And he could use more common sense because he’s not that clever.
He’ll never win an Oscar, never run a marathon,
His sense of fashion in the 80s is something we won’t dwell upon.
I won’t play his CDs in the car until his choices are less dour.
I couldn’t stand to hear him sing much longer in the shower.
I can say all these things to him, he’s never heard the likes of these
Because surprisingly enough, he’s never heard of litotes
Once upon a time (cliché) I started to study (alliteration and sibilance) rhetoric and figures of speech (tautology), and because I’m a bleeding idiot (understatement) I decided to do it by writing a short poem about each one (anti-climax). The results were somewhat less than spectacular (litotes). In fact ‘litotes’, a term describing the figure of speech whereby we state or imply one thing in order to emphasise the opposite (usually for very negative or positive effect) and pronounced, “lih-toe-tees”, was one of the three or four that I managed to write before I gave the whole thing up as a bad idea. :
The best thing that you can say about it is that I was inspired by Wendy Cope’s poem “Faint Praise”; a phrase, like the poem it recalls, also being an example of litotes.
I never gave up wanting to learn more about them. I listened to the audiobook of Mark Forysth’s ‘The Elements of Eloquence’ (superbly and snarkily spoken by Simon Shepherd), I collected new examples that I found in writing and on the web, and I made digital flashcards out of them which helped me understand that I do not learn anything from using flashcards.
It's a Queer Old Blog... 