Talk:Litotes

message: "The use of litotes is common in English, Russian, German, Dutch, Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and French."
This list makes litotes sound exclusive to these languages, or at least marks these languages as somehow more likely to use litotes. It's a very simple construction, most languages in the world probably use it in some form or another. Take a look at the languages this article is translated into, as far as I can tell, most seem to give examples in that language, and even this is far from representative of every language. I know Spanish does just as much as English or French, but it's not on the list. I'm sure a true list would be unworkable/endless, but the phrasing should at least be adjusted to reflect the fact that these are just a few examples, and not the definitive set of litote-using languages. Perhaps something like: Litotes can be found in many languages throughout the world, including English, Russian, German, ... etc.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 97.104.96.207 (talk) 05:13, 20 July 2015 (UTC)
thread_title: Language list

message: Am I the only one who understands this as something else then "you're correct"? I always imagined it as a nice way of saying that you are in fact kinda wrong. "You are not wrong, but..."  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.241.122.214 (talk) 21:28, 13 May 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: This is partially correct understanding. It's usually used in context that "The fact you cited is true but irrelevant to the point or relevant in a way that doesn't make you right about the point." You're correct about the little thing but you're still wrong about the big image. 37.209.134.10 (talk) 06:33, 9 October 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: "You are not wrong"

message: "These examples are not terribly difficult to come up with."
I thought you could not use prepositions at the end of the sentence.  It would be better to say "...difficult to conjure" or something to that effect, no? 24.49.35.99 (talk) 05:02, 10 February 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: You can.  There's a "rule" that you shouldn't or even mustn't, but it's best to just ignore it. --jae (talk) 23:14, 11 January 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Is this grammatically correct

message: *Litotes and pretty much any term linked from Figures of speech - these are dictionary definitions - DropDeadGorgias 20:43, Feb 24, 2004 (UTC)
**I've gone through the links from Figures of speech, and these are all of the articles that are purely definitions: Accumulatio, Aposiopesis, Meiosis (figure of speech), Anastrophe, Anthimeria, Catachresis, Chiasmus, Periphrasis, Enallage, Hyperbaton, Metalepsis, Paralipsis, Proslepsis, Syllepsis, Synecdoche, Tmesis, Dystmesis, Zeugma.  I don't know what the policy on batch-vfds is, so please let me know.  Should I go put the subst:vfd on every page?- DropDeadGorgias 21:17, Feb 24, 2004 (UTC)
***Relocate 'em all, then delete.  (Not my job :D) Oberiko 22:50, 24 Feb 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Votes for Deletion

message: I have removed the following passage:
::Also in French, the idiomatic saying "ce n'est pas terrible" in English would literally translate as "it isn't terrible" and would therefore appear to be an understatement actually asserting the contrary. But in fact, "ce n'est pas terrible" means that the thing in question really was awful.
This passage is just confused.  "Terrible" is a false-friend in French; it means "wonderful" or something of the sort.  So "ce n'est pas terrible" is just a straightforward example of litotes, not the odd French usage the author seemed to think. --Christopher M 22:12, 17 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Um, no. I don't know enough about the subject to really correct the article, but I can tell you that the French word terrible does indeed mean terrible; see terrible - Dictionnaire Français-Anglais WordReference.com, or any other dictionary. Ruakh 00:19, 18 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I didn't word my objection very well.  "Terrible" in French means (in relevant part) something that inspires strong emotion.  To say something is "pas terrible" means that it doesn't do that, because it's mediocre.  The passage I removed assumed that the "terrible" in "ce n'est pas terrible" means "awful," which it doesn't.  --Christopher M 00:41, 28 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Oh, I see. Apparently (according to Le Trésor de la Langue Française informatisé), the phrase pas terrible with the meaning médiocre derives from the no-longer-very-common sense Sensationnel, extraordinaire, propre à susciter l'admiration. (Granted, the origin of a phrase is not necessarily the same as its current use — in this case I think pas terrible is pretty much an idiom, usable even by those who don't know about terrible's old-fashioned sense.) Either way, that example has been gone for a while now, so don't worry about it. :-) Ruakh 02:59, 28 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I actually wondered about "Ce n'est pas terrible" myself. :) I agree with you, 'tis more of an idiom. The inverse can be heard as well "C'est terrible" which can mean something is actually quite good. -dmoore1  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.128.67.22 (talk) 16:32, 30 September 2008 (UTC)

text: Sounds good, thanks. :-) —RuakhTALK 07:29, 6 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Examples 

message: litotes? What do you think? Does the Queen say something like "I am not amused" herself or is it always the press that writes this sentence in reference to the ideal of understatement? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 84.56.45.77 (talk • contribs) .
: I think the standard line is actually We are not amused; see Pluralis majestatis (royal we). Ruakh 16:37, 28 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: * Attributed to Victoria Regina, and is unclear whether or not the royal "we" was involved: it has been argued she was speaking on behalf of all the women of the court, supported by the accounts' apparent agreement that ribaldry was involved and presumed by its utterer to be humorous.--Jerzy•t 22:30, 3 February 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  The queen was not amused. 

message: It would seem that some Litotes, like "The food was not bad.", will draw a positive response when responded to.
for example, your friend says
"The food was not bad."
you reply, "Yeah", You are agreeing with your friend.  if you said "No", you would still be agreeing.
The statement "That was no big deal." has the same sort of response forcing effect.
Is there another term for this, or is this just a subsection of what a Litote is?
Also, reading the article makes me wonder if anyone knows the singular form for Litotes, it seems as if using a singular form of the word was intentionally avoided, to confuse anyone who might decide to refer to a single one.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Mad Gouki (talk • contribs) 15:56, 24 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  response to some Litotes does not matter. 

message: In Frisian we always say "That doesn't itch" when somebody gets a terrible accidents or undergoes very heavy pains. I was wondering, is that litotes or is it an understatement? -SK-luuut 21:49, 15 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Litotes or understatement? 

message: I have taken the liberty of doing a major revision of this article. Referring back to the OED, Enc. Brit. and some other dictionaries including a Larousse in French, the author of much of the preceding v. I found was seriously mistaken about what constitutes litotes. A figure of speech, or a trick of rhetoric, is not something that applies only to one phrase in an utterance; it applies to the whole thing. Therefore the example of a negated phrase that was part of a longer utterance and did not have the effect of subtly achieving emphasis by understatement is not a case of litotes.
Further, the entire section about the meaning of the displaced negation in French has a point, and I actually rewrote it so that it was true (what I found missed the point it was trying to make); but then after reflecting again on all the definitions of this term in the authorities I concluded that that was not about litotes at all, so I deleted it.
It would be nice to know where the correct point belongs and to put it there. It is a sort of figure of speech or a syntactical phenomenon but for the moment its identification escapes me.
For convenience, this is what it said before I arrived:
... in French, the sentence "Il faut qu'il aille" means "It's necessary that he go," while its opposite, "Il ne faut pas qu'il aille," means "it is not necessary that he go," which is much stronger than its English counterpart.
This is what I left until I deleted it altogether (as unrelated to litotes):
in colloquial French, whereas the sentence "Il faut qu'il aille" means "It's necessary that he go", its opposite, "Il ne faut pas qu'il aille" (literally "It is not necessary that he go") is actually said usually with the meaning "He must not go", which is much stronger than its literal English counterpart.
Iph (talk) 16:50, 18 March 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Major revision 

message: To start in theme, this article is not bad; however, it seems to suggest the misleading idea that litotes is a phenomenon strictly linked to each language, in particular, that is something typical of English, and exported or just occasionally present in other languages. While it is true that polite English uses in a master way this rhetoric figure, often with ironic meaning, the article forgets that litotes is a greek word  ( λιτότης), and that in fact the definition and classification of the rhetoric figures is due to the Greek culture. The sentence 
In Latin, an example of litotes can be found in Ovid's Metamorphoses: "non semel" ,
as it were a hapax, sounds a bit odd or ridicolous, for there are hundreds and hundreds of examples in every Latin author as well as, of course, in every Greek one (although the article quotes none...). It's like saying: 
"In English, an example of personal pronoun can be found in Dickens' David Copperfield" etc.
--PMajer (talk) 16:57, 23 October 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Litotes in English vs other languages?

message: It's quite wrong-headed to say that Orwell is against litotes in general. "He was not cruel" is a litote; "He was not unmerciful" is merely a vague and sloppy way of saying "He was merciful". It is the latter, the "not un-" construction, that bothered him. Indeed, the passage from the King James Ecclesiastes that he quotes in "P&EL" as an example of great writing is arguably the world's most famous litote. Quoth Orwell:
::"One can cure oneself of the not un- formation by memorizing this sentence: A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field."
I'm removing that claim, which is at best seriously misleading, and at worst wrong.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.135.193.48 (talk) 09:24, 4 February 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Orwell and Litotes

message: Does that famous line from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy fit as an example? KingAlanI (talk) 05:49, 30 October 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I disagree. Taking the sentence apart and removing all negations, you come up with "minimally similar to tea." The comedic effect is in "unlike" used in a phrase where traditionally "like" is used, similarly to "floating in air like bricks don't." Still, whether that's litotes is arguable.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 37.209.140.184 (talk) 06:48, 9 October 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: Not entirely unlike tea

message: Sometimes the words used by other people are ambiguous. Sometimes discussions/arguments over degrees of meaning can be difficult to understand or to tie to actual events/objects. Word have import. So if someone says something that I agree with but don't know for sure that we are on the same page, I might say "It's certainly not a controversial comment." when someone else says "It's a fact." ... when I'm not sure the context or any special meanings or maybe jargon that others may share.
Benvhoff (talk) 04:18, 14 August 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  My take on "not _______" 

message: The article says the a Litotes is an understatement used for emphasis. Most of the examples are just phrases using "not x" In some cases this is used for de-emphasis. That is, they are not understaments, but euphemisms. That is, if you say someone is not skinny, because you want to point out they are fat, it is Litotes, but if you are doing it to avoid saying they are fat, it is euphemism. I am not sure what it is if you call someone not skinny, but think they are neither fat nor skinny, but it is not an understatement. Tinynanorobots (talk) 16:27, 22 November 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm sorry but I don't agree. Saying a person is plump or hefty or stalky or heavy or even overweight may be euphemisms for fat. But if you say that such a person is "not skinny" you are usually emphasizing their obesity. As in "Strange that my mother in law talks about my paunch when she's not exactly skinny herself." Do you think that's euphemism? SBHarris 18:46, 22 November 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: interesting. it really depends on context and enunciation. i think if i heard you saying that sentence, i would know much more what you meant, than if i just read it. it reminds me of the discussion about the need for a sarcasm font.... Soosim (talk) 06:55, 23 November 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Where is the EMPHASIS? 

message: I don't know what illiterate cult the author belongs to but their interpretation of Ecclesiastes 7:17 is completely wrong.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 46.7.228.74 (talk) 14:28, 8 February 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Ecclesiastes 

message: Can you say "this is a litotes"? Or do you have to say "this is an example of litotes"?Hypershock (talk) 06:33, 30 April 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  How do you use "litotes" in a sentence?