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Overstatement In A Speech : What Is Overstatement?

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Overstatement (hyperbole) is sometimes used for emphasis (‘I have a million things to do today) and sometimes for ironic effect as, from a conversation among a group of scientist about communicating with non-scientists.” If we were better communicators we would be swimming in money.” This also illustrates the combination of overstatement with metaphor; in this case number is weight. An example of overstatement combined with metonym is ‘I have a ton of papers to grade,’ where the weight of papers is associated with the number of them. Understatement is often used ironically, as in’ we have a little problem here ‘where understatement, combined with the metaphor, importance size. (Ritchie, 2003, p.18) 2.4.7. Idioms Idioms, expressions that are commonly used within a speech community to express a consistent idea or experience, represent a special case. Some of these, like ‘ kick the bucket and ‘ take with a grain of salt have become thoroughly lexicalized, and even if they think of them as metaphorical, very few people could explain the metaphorical mapping’, why they have the meaning they do. Other idioms, however , have an easily recovered metaphorical origin” Ivory Tower” at least among academicians, is readily understand in terms of the idealistic purity of “Ivory” and the isolation from worldly cares implied by “tower”? The blood of slaves and slaves owners”, from Obama’s speech, is based on an archaic understanding of reproductive biology, in which sperm was
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