Irony & Understatement
Meiosis / Understatement
Deliberately calling something smaller than it is — a wound is 'a scratch.' The gap between the thing and its label makes the reader imagine the real size, which usually overshoots.
"'Tis but a flesh wound."
Don't confuse it with Litotes. Litotes is understatement achieved specifically through negation ('not unkind'); meiosis just shrinks the label.
In the Reader — 9 excerpts
Reader, I married him.
Whose woods these are I think I know.
In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains.
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.
All this happened, more or less.
It was pointed at his trousers. "You can't do that anymore, Sam."
We finished our coffee in a leisurely way before we went to check.
Sixty Million and more
Travels with
Devices that share a passage with meiosis / understatement most often — company reveals character.
The rest of the family
Irony Hyperbole Litotes Bathos Euphemism Periphrasis Apophasis