Much to the chagrin of those who like to gripe about "the good old days," language changes. All the time.
Sometimes that can be a pain, such as when you're trying to read historical documents that use archaic English vocabulary and sentence structure. (Not Old English, mind you—that's a separate language altogether.) However, these documents can also be (perhaps unintentionally) hilarious.
See, in the modern United States, we often use exaggeration to create humor. For example, during heavy rainstorms in North Carolina, I often joked with my coworkers that our homeward commute might have to become a canoe-te. But in earlier centuries, English speakers on both sides of the Atlantic were far more restrained in their self-expression. We still see this in the modern British tendency to create humor by using litotes—which, to quote my inimitable medieval-literature professor, is "extreme inverted understatement. E.g., 'he's not sprightly' means 'he's extremely dead.'"
When someone uses understatement, extreme or not, to talk about something important or alarming, the results can be side-splitting. I found this example on Pinterest the other night:
😱🤣
The way I imagine this scene, there was probably a lot of blood, broken glass and violin parts everywhere, much screaming from both Merlin—ouch—and the horrified bystanders, and at least a lady or two who fainted from a combination of the stress and those suffocatingly tight eighteenth-century corsets. No laughing matter! But the excerpt quoted above (from a book published in 1895) recounts the mishap so matter-of-factly that it sounds like this was nothing unusual. 😨 The event and its description are so incongruous that we can't help but laugh.
(Thankfully, according to the book, Merlin survived the accident.)
So the next time you're having trouble bringing humor into a scene, try understating something that probably shouldn't be understated. It's often much funnier than exaggeration.
Write on,
Candice
(Photo by Dmitrii Vorobev on Unsplash)
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