Litotes

Litotes is a trope of artistic understatement of the size, force or significance of an object, the opposite of hyperbole ("a thumb-sized boy," "next to nothing," "two steps from here"). A second, rhetorical meaning of litotes is affirmation through the negation of the opposite ("not without talent" instead of "talented"), which lends the utterance restraint, caution or an ironic shade. As a means of understatement, litotes emphasises the smallness, inconspicuousness or modesty of an object, often with a lyrical or humorous colouring. Both varieties of litotes operate on the contrast between the real degree of a feature and its linguistic presentation. Litotes is widespread in folklore, in colloquial speech and in literature as a subtle means of emotional-evaluative characterisation.