Hyperbole

This stylistic device is aimed at intensification of meaning. Hyperbole (гипербола, преувеличение) denotes a deliberate extreme exaggeration of the quality of the object: He was so tall that I was not sure he had a face. (O. Henry); All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. (Shakespeare); a car as big as a house; the man-mountain (человек-гора, Гулливер); a thousand pardons; I've told you a million times; He was scared to death; I'd give anything to see it.

Hyperbole, like epithet, relies on the fore­grounding of the emotive meaning. The feelings and emotions of the speaker are so ruffled that he resorts in his speech to intensifying the quantitative or the qualitative aspect of the mentioned object.

Hyperbole is one of the most common expressive means of our everyday speech. When we describe our admiration or anger and say "I would gladly see this film a hundred times", or "I have told it to you a thousand times"—we use trite language hyperboles which, through long and repeated use, have lost their originality and re­mained signals of the speaker's roused emotions.

Hyperbole may be the final effect of another SD—metaphor, smile, irony, as we have in the cases "He has the tread (поступь, походка) of a rhinoceros ‘or "The man was like the Rock of Gibraltar".

Hyperbole can be expressed by all notional parts of speech. There are words though, which are used in this SD more often than others. They are such pronouns as "all", "every", "everybody" and the like. Cf.: "Calpurnia was all angles and bones" (H.L.); also numerical nouns ("a million", "a thousand"), as was shown above; and adverbs of time ("ever", "never").

The outstanding Russian philologist A. Peshkovsky once stressed the importance of both communicants clearly perceiving that the ex­aggeration, used by one of them, is intended as such and serves not to denote actual quality or quantity but signals the emotional back­ground of the utterance. If this reciprocal understanding of the inten­tional nature of the overstatement is absent, hyperbole turns into a mere lie, he said.

Hyperbole is aimed at exaggerating quantity or quality. When it is directed the opposite way, when the size, shape, dimensions, charac­teristic features of the object are not overrated, but intentionally un­derrated, we deal with understatement/meiosis (преуменьшение/мейозис). The mechanism of its creation and functioning is identical with that of hyperbole, and it does not signify the actual state of affairs in reality, but presents the latter through the emotionally colored perception and rendering of the speaker. Both of them differ only in the direction of the flow of roused emotions. English is well known for its preference for understatement in everyday speech—"I am rath­er annoyed" instead of "I'm infuriated", "The wind is rather strong" instead of "There's a gale blowing outside" are typical of British po­lite speech, but are less characteristic of American English.

Some hyperboles and understatements (both used individually and as the final effect of some other SD) have become fixed, as we have in "Snow White", or "Lilliput", or "Gargantua". Cf. with Russian – мальчик-с-пальчик, дюймовочка, мужичок-с-ноготок.

Exercise III. In the following examples concentrate on cases of hy­perbole and understatement. Pay attention to their originality or stateness, to other SDs promoting their effect, to exact words con­taining the foregrounded emotive meaning:

1. I was scared to death when he entered the room. (S.)

2. The girls were dressed to kill. (J.Br.)

3. Newspapers are the organs of individual men who have jockeyed themselves to be party leaders, in countries where a new party is born every hour over a glass of beer in the nearest cafe. (J.R.)

4. I was violently sympathetic, as usual. (Jn.B.)

5. Four loudspeakers attached to the flagpole emitted a shattering roar of what Benjamin could hardly call music, as if it were played by a collection of brass bands, a few hundred fire engines, a thousand blacksmiths' hammers and the amplified reproduc­tion of a force-twelve wind. (A. S.)

6. The car which picked me up on that particular guilty evening was a Cadillac limousine about seventy-three blocks long. (J.B.)

7. Her family is one aunt about a thousand years old. (Sc.F.)

8. He didn't appear like the same man; then he was all milk and honey—now he was all starch and vinegar. (D.)

9. She was a giant of a woman. Her bulging figure was encased in a green crepe dress and her feet overflowed in red shoes. She car­ried a mammoth red pocketbook that bulged throughout as if it were stuffed with rocks. (Fl. O'C.)

10. She was very much upset by the catastrophe that had befallen the Bishops, but it was exciting, and she was tickled to death to have someone fresh to whom she could tell all about it. (S.M.)

11. Babbitt's preparations for leaving the office to its feeble self dur­ing the hour and a half of his lunch-period were somewhat less elaborate than the plans for a general European War. (S.M.)

12. The little woman, for she was of pocket size, crossed her hands solemnly on her middle. (G.)

13. We danced on the handkerchief-big space between the speak easy tables. (R.W.)

14. She wore a pink hat, the size of a button. (J.R.)

15. She was a sparrow of a woman. (Ph. L.)

16. And if either of us should lean toward the other, even a fraction of an inch, the balance would be upset. (O.W.)

17. He smiled back, breathing a memory of gin at me. (W.G.)

18. About a very small man in the Navy: this new sailor stood five feet nothing in sea boots. (Th.P.)

19. She busied herself in her midget kitchen. (T.C.)

20. The rain had thickened, fish could have swum through the air. (T.C.)

ASSIGNMENTS FOR SELF-CONTROL

• What meaning is foregrounded in a hyperbole?

• What types of hyperbole can you name?

• What makes a hyperbole trite and where are trite hyperboles pre­dominantly used?

• What is understatement? In what way does it differ from hyperbole?

• Recollect cases of vivid original hyperboles or understatements from your English reading.