Today’s WOTD – 12 October 2012

litotes

[LAHY-tuh-teez]

noun

1. Understatement, especially that in which an affirmative is expressed by the negative of its contrary, as in “not bad at all.”

Examples:
Stevens does not allow himself much of the Sublime here, yet it creeps in by negation in the litotes or understatement of the stanza’s close.
— Harold Bloom, Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate

I know it’s a textbook example of what lit-crit geeks like to call litotes , a figure of speech in which an affirmative is expressed through the negation of its opposite…
— Mark Dery, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts

Origin:
Litotes comes from the Greek word lītótēs which meant “plainness, simplicity.”

Today’s aphorism

‘While England endeavors to cure the potato-rot, will not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally?’

Henry David Thoreau

On this day

12 October 2002 – Terrorist bombings of the Sari Club and Paddy’s Bar in Kuta, Bali, kill 202 people and injure 209. Members of Jemaah Islamiyah, a group linked with Al Qaeda, are convicted of the crime and on 9 November 2006, three of them are executed by firing squad.