Litotes
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Featured: A Scheme for abolishing all Words is one of the wittiest and smartest comments on semantics. (Illustration: extreme close-up from the movie "The Big Swallow" (1901), produced and directed by James Williamson (1855-1933) |
In rhetoric, litotes is a figure of speech in which a certain statement is expressed by denying its opposite. For example, rather than merely saying that a person is rather attractive (or even very attractive), one might say that he or she is "not unattractive".
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