meiosis
- noun
- /maɪˈoʊsɪs/
- Literature
:
meiosis
- He used meiosis when he described his failure as a simple 'minor setback'.
Examples
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The speaker's meiosis helped to downplay the seriousness of the situation by referring to the disaster as a 'small inconvenience'.
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We also consider specific rhetorical figures in the tales that convey the psychological/emotional states of Poe's frenzied narrators (for instance, litotes, meiosis, epizeuxis, diacope).
Academic text (1997) -
In her speech, she employed meiosis to emphasize her achievements by calling them just a 'little success'.
Synonyms
Saying something good by saying the opposite is not true
Surface Forms
Morphology
meiosis = meio + osis
Although etymologically built from Greek elements meaning 'lessening' + noun-forming '-osis', these combining forms are not productive or recognizable to an average B1 learner, so the rhetorical sense 'understatement' is not directly inferable from the parts.
Etymology
Meiosis comes from the Greek root meio-, which means 'less' or 'to make smaller'. A helpful way to remember it is that it names a way of speaking that makes something seem smaller on purpose, so the origin explains the modern meaning of deliberate understatement.
