noun
meiosis
Deliberate understatement that makes something seem less important.
Calling a major disaster “a little trouble” is deliberate meiosis.
Etymology
Greek meiōsis means lessening. Rhetoric applies that reduction to deliberate understatement, making an event or quality sound smaller than it really is.
More examples
- The mayor uses meiosis when she calls the budget crisis a minor setback.
- Her description of the blizzard as sweater weather is meiosis.
- Through meiosis, the narrator makes his heroic rescue sound routine.
Forms
meiosis · meioses
Similar words
- understatement
- Broader everyday term that does not necessarily imply deliberate rhetoric.
- litotes
- Understates specifically by denying the opposite, as in “not bad.”