Litotes vs Periphrasis - What's the difference?
litotes | periphrasis |
(rhetoric) A figure of speech in which the speaker emphasizes the magnitude of a statement by denying its opposite; a figure of speech in which understatement is used with negation to express a positive attribute; a form of irony
{{examples-right, sense=figure of speech, width=60%, examples=* She's not the nicest person I know (to indicate meanness)
* He's not exactly a rocket scientist (to indicate lack of intelligence)
* Organizing these records is no small task (to indicate difficulty)
* Not bad (that is to say, good)}} (-) The use of a longer expression instead of a shorter one with a similar meaning, for example "I am going to" instead of "I will".
(linguistics) Expressing a grammatical meaning (such as a tense) using a syntactic construction rather than morphological marking.
(rhetoric) The substitution of a descriptive word or phrase for a proper name (a species of circumlocution)
(rhetoric) The use of a proper name as a shorthand to stand for qualities associated with it.
In rhetoric terms the difference between litotes and periphrasis
is that litotes is a figure of speech in which the speaker emphasizes the magnitude of a statement by denying its opposite; a figure of speech in which understatement is used with negation to express a positive attribute; a form of irony while periphrasis is the use of a proper name as a shorthand to stand for qualities associated with it.litotes
English
(wikipedia litotes)Noun
(-)* He's not exactly a rocket scientist (to indicate lack of intelligence)
* Organizing these records is no small task (to indicate difficulty)
* Not bad (that is to say, good)}} (-)