Hyperbole

Hello everyone, I’m Hamidreza Ahmadi with Lingophoenix. We, human beings, have a million different ways to talk about our feelings and emotions, and one of these many ways is Hyperbole. Well, what is hyperbole? I guess some of you already know, and some might not have the faintest idea. However, hyperbole is common of any language. Take a look at these situations. You and your friend were supposed to meet at the cinema at 8 o’clock. It’s 8:20 and STILL they haven’t arrived. You get mad. You call your friend and say, I’ve been waiting here for you all by myself for ages. Are you coming or what? Your friend, who now knows that you are a bit disconcerted, tries to calm you down by saying that they’ll be there in a jiffy. But you, your friend, and now I know that this is far from true. First of all, it’s not ages just 20 minutes; second, there is no way that your friend will be there in a second. Hyperbole is involved here. While you used hyperbole to show how mad you were, your friend used it to compose you. Hyperbole can be used for plenty of reasons, in commercials for instance. The ad begins with a really attractive woman rubbing lotion on her hands, with the voiceover saying “If you want your skin softer than silk, buy our products” – of course, a lot more implicitly, but I’m sure you get the idea. The Tesla Automobile Manufacturing Company might claim that their cars are light-years ahead of their rivals’. But really? Light years? Hyperbole is an excellent literary device that has its effects on our romantic lives as well. To win the hearts of our sweethearts we usually use hyperbole. People don’t just say “I love you, honey” anymore; now it’s ‘love you to the moon and back’, or ‘I love you more than Earth and Heavens combined’. Some people even take stronger measures to show how much they love one another by saying I love you so much I can kill for you, and lots of other things that you are better aware of. I also have a lame one, it says, when you walk into a room it is as if it is filled with roses. When you’re very hungry, you won’t hesitate to say stuff like I’m absolutely starving, or stuff like I’m so hungry I can eat a horse. When your mother cooks a lot and you know it’s too much, you can say ‘my mom has cooked enough to feed an army.’ When we want to say how intellectually deprived someone is we can say ‘one’s brain is the size of a pea’. When someone can run really quickly, we can say ‘they run like the wind’. Another hyperbolic statement I hear all the time is snowed under as in ‘Jamal is snowed under a lot of work this weekend’. You can also use hyperbole to talk about someone’s appearance like when you say, he’s as skinny as a toothpick, the man is taller than a house, or my sister puts so much make up on, she is 50 kilograms more when she is done. The examples to find for hyperbole are countless, and to be honest, the more creative you are, the better hyperbolic innovations you can come up with. Sarcasm and hyperbole can work really well together. Take this for example, you’re late for a party and your partner is taking so much time to get ready. You look at their faces and calmly say, “take your time, we got the whole day”. Hyperbole is a literary device. In other words, we can find many examples for it in Literature. An American poet, W. H. Auden writes: I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you Till China and Africa meet, And the river jumps over the mountain And the salmon sing in the street. Joseph Conrad, another writer, in his “Heart of Darkness” writes, “I had to stay in the station for ten days – an eternity.” Your time is worth a billion dollars, and I would like to thank you an ocean for listening to me..

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Hyperbole is an episode from Lingo Phoenix's Podcasts.

This episode is 00:04:41 long.

This episode was published on May 31, 2021.

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