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Litotes 

Updated: Nov 16

Litotes, which is pronounced as lye-tuh-teez, often takes the form of the double negative while being used as understatement. For example, “He is not unhandsome” probably suggests the person saying it feels that it would be too immodest to say “He’s handsome” outright. 


What is litotes?


Litotes is a rhetorical device that occurs when a speaker denies the opposite of a claim instead of making an affirmative claim directly. It is famous in everyday language as a double negative.


Here is an example of the device being used by Alfred Lord Tennyson.


Lord Tennyson, “Ulysses” (1842): 


Death closes all: but something ere the end,

Some work of noble note, may yet be done,

Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.


Here, Ulysses is referring to himself and what remains of his original crew that survived the Odyssey. The phrase “. . . men that strove with Gods” is a kind of bragging, which he attempts to tone down with the litotic phrase “not unbecoming.” 


Portrait of Alfred Lord Tennyson
Portrait of Alfred Lord Tennyson.

Here is another use of litotes by Alfred, Lord Tennyson in another poem.


Tennyson, "Charge of the Light Brigade" (1854):


“Forward, the Light Brigade!”

Was there a man dismayed?

Not though the soldier knew

Someone had blundered.

Theirs not to make reply,

Theirs not to reason why,

Theirs but to do and die.

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.


Litotes is used to describe the sad fate of the men who had no choice but to follow mistaken orders even if it meant death. "Theirs" is a possessive pronoun that we expect to be used to describe people's relationship to their property, rights, or anything else that rightfully belongs to them. However, in the poem, it is used to describe the exact opposite.


The soldiers have no right to reply, question, or reason an order, even if the order was a "blunder" that meant almost sure death for them. Tennyson uses litotes to demonstrate the sad irony of the soldiers' position and fate in the military hierarchy. In this article, we explain the effects of using litotes and provide some more examples of the device being effectively used. 


Why writers use litotes


Litotes has a variety of uses. As a double negative, it can be used to be polite or not too harsh. It may also be an artifice to get a jab in or be used for satiric or comic effect. We will take a look at the various uses of this rhetorical device here. 


1. It has a polite effect. Litotes is typically used to take the edge off a harsh observation. For example, “Well, he’s no saint” being used to describe a violent criminal is putting it politely. 


2. It emphasizes absence or a negative trait. By expressing something in the negative you can emphasize the absence of the trait that is negated. 


3. It has an ironic or satiric effect. Litotes can have an ironic effect. For example, “He ain’t no genius” in common parlance is a snarky way of saying “He’s stupid.”


Examples of litotes


Walpole, letter to Horace Mann (1743):


She says the Prince of Denmark is not so tall as his bride, but far from a bad figure: he is thin, and not ugly, except having too wide a mouth.

This excerpt is probably saying the prince’s appearance is mediocre and unimpressive by describing it as “not ugly.” 


Chesterton, Orthodoxy (1908): 


Historic Christianity was accused, not entirely without reason, of carrying martyrdom and asceticism to a point, desolate and pessimistic.

Chesterton is admitting here that the criticism of Christianity as promoting a desolate and pessimistic asceticism was accurate. However, perhaps he sympathizes with Christian values and softens the observation with “not entirely without reason.” 


Twain, Following the Equator (1897):


She was not quite what you would call refined. She was not quite what you would call unrefined. She was the kind of person that keeps a parrot. 

In the above excerpt, Mark Twain uses litotes to give a rather accurate description. One of the dangers of using litotes is that it may lack clarity. There is no danger of this in the Mark Twain quote.


Twain effectively locates the social class that the woman belongs to by sandwiching her between two litotic sentences and clarifying it by making mention of her owning a parrot. The readers of the time would have been able to immediately recognize this lady as belonging to the aspiring middle class, just as we are able to recognize the social class of someone who describes themselves as a "pet mom" today.


Wilde, The Decay of Dying (1889): 


As a writer he has mastered everything except language: as a novelist he can do everything, except tell the truth: as an artist he is everything except articulate.

This is litotes being used as satire and humor. A writer who masters everything besides language is surely not a writer at all. This excerpt takes the idea of damning with faint praise to an extreme level by making use of the exception that swallows the rule.


Balfour, speech at St. Andrews University (1887):


That “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing” is a saying which has now got currency as a proverb stamped in the mint of Pope’s versification — of Pope who, with the most imperfect knowledge of Greek, translated Homer; with the most imperfect knowledge of the Elizabethan drama, edited Shakespeare; and with the most imperfect knowledge of philosophy, wrote the “Essay on Man.”

The speech by Balfour belongs to the same category of litotes that was used by Wilde. It is used for ironic and sarcastic effect. The superlative “most” is typically used to highlight positive attributes. For example, we would expect “most perfect.” But here, the opposite is being done, and it is being used to criticize Pope’s lack of in-depth scholarship in the areas in which he held himself up as an authority. 


References


Farnsworth, W. (2010). Farnsworth's Classical English Rhetoric. David R. Godine. 

 

Cite this EminentEdit article

Antoine, M. (2024, October 16). Litotes. https://www.eminentediting.com/post/litotes


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