Litotes

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Litotes is a language device where you combine a negative word (like “no”, “not”, “don’t”, “isn’t”, etc) with a word or phrase to express the opposite thing for effect. For example, “I’m not happy” means you’re unhappy.

When you put one of those negative words on a statement, it’s called “negation”.

You pronounce “litotes” as “lie-TOE-tees” in British English. When you want to put the word in a sentence, it stays the same whether you use it in the singular or plural form. Both of them are correct. If that feels weird to you, you can also say “the use of litotes” instead. I prefer that, personally!

People can use litotes for many different reasons. Most often, we use it to underplay what we’re saying or show surprise.

Some of the most common examples of litotes are:

• That’s not quite what I meant.
• Not bad!
• It’s not dissimilar to that.

It’s important to note, though, that it’s not always going to be litotes when you use a negative word. For example, if someone said you were unhappy and you replied “I’m not unhappy”, it wouldn’t count. Why? Well, because you’re not actually trying to express the opposite idea. You’re just disagreeing with your interlocutor. On the other hand, if someone asked you how you felt about something and you said, “I’m not unhappy”, it counts because you’re just stating how you feel using a negation. You could just be straightforward!

Whether something counts as litotes or not is going to depend on the context and tone you use.

When Do People Use Litotes?

There are plenty of reasons why a text producer might choose to use litotes in their work. It has its benefits compared to saying what you want to say in a straightforward way. After all, there are plenty of times when it’s just not useful or appropriate to be blunt.

I’ve thought of some of the most common uses of litotes that you could find in the texts you study – or in your own words.

Of course, there are other reasons why people might use litotes. There is never a definitive list of reasons why someone might use a device in their work. You just have to notice that they’re doing it and then think for yourself what impact it’s had on their work.

The best way to do this is to think about the effect that the writer has created with their work before you think about which devices they use. Ask yourself what they are communicating in terms of:

• Message
• Voice
• Characterisation
• Atmosphere
• Thoughts and emotions

Then, once you’ve done that, you can ask yourself how the devices they use contribute to that.

However, if you’re new to that, this list below is a great start.

Understatement

It is very common to find text producers using litotes as a way to understate what they’re trying to say. When you use it in this way, it has the opposite effect of hyperbole. Your language is way calmer and more mundane than the actual situation.

A common use of this is when we want to be modest. For example, when you know you’re good at a skill, but you don’t want to show off, you might say something like:

I'm not terrible at sports.

When you use litotes for understatement, it can also create verbal irony.

For example, let’s say you’ve had the worst day of your life. Your car broke down, you got injured, you lost £1000, and your romantic partner left you. Then, you said this:

I haven't had the best day.

If we know what actually happened to you on that day, this use of litotes for understatement comes across as ironic. The language foregrounds itself here since we know the truth. So, it adds to the comedy or highlights an interesting character detail about you: that you are quite stoic!

Showing that Expectations Were Subverted

We also use litotes to let our text receivers know that we were surprised by how things turned out. Our expectations were subverted.

There’s a really common example from the Edexcel A-level English Language and Literature Voices Anthology. In the extract from the travelogue Sea and Sardinia, D.H. Lawrence says this:

I slept not so badly...

The implicature that we get from what he writes here is that he was expecting to not sleep well. It suggests that he’s pleasantly surprised with how things turned out on his travels.

Litotes are great to use as a quick, efficient way of communicating that you expected the exact opposite thing to happen. It shows your surprise without you having to say it explicitly. Often, we use them to show that a good thing happened, just like D.H. Lawrence.

I’ve seen litotes used this way more with British English speakers than with American English ones. Maybe it has something to do with our more cynical, pessimistic culture. We tend to be more cynical, sarcastic and self-deprecating than our friends across the pond. Studies suggest that we rely more on negative politeness and focus more on our negative face than Americans. So, it makes sense that we might use litotes more – we don’t tend to emphasise expecting good things.

Politeness

Speaking of politeness and negative faces, one of the other functions of litotes is for the sake of being polite. It helps us to maintain good relationships with people by foregrounding the fact that we don’t really want to upset them.

According to Brown and Levinson’s Politeness Theory, we are always trying to navigate between people’s two (social) “faces”. These are their positive face and their negative face.

The positive face is focused on image. It’s the part of you that wants other people to like, respect or appreciate you. In other words, it’s about trying to make sure that people have positive thoughts and feelings about you – and that you have positive thoughts and feelings about yourself, too!

On the other hand, the negative face is focused on freedom. It’s about wanting to be left alone to do what you want to do. Your negative face doesn’t want anyone to tell you what to do, control you or ask you to do something you wouldn’t otherwise do. It just wants you to be able to exist without any outside interference.

When people hurt one of those faces, they commit a Face-Threatening Act, or FTA.

Politeness comes from when we recognise that we’re going to hurt another one of someone’s faces. We try our best to say or do things that make that FTA hurt a little less.

Litotes are a great example of us trying to be polite. It shows that we understand that we’ve hurt someone’s face and we’re not happy to be doing it. For example:

That wasn't quite what I had in mind.

Telling someone “this is wrong” can hurt their positive face. So, we can use litotes like in the example above to soften the blow a little bit.

Hedging

When we use litotes to be polite, it is a form of hedging. After all, we do use it because we acknowledge that we’re saying something that might come across as too harsh or forceful. Litotes help to soften our language.

However, there are many other reasons that you might use litotes to hedge other than just politeness.

For example, we could do it for our own sake. It could be to protect what we’re saying from seeming like we’re too sure of ourselves. That way, it’s less likely that someone might call us out for what we’ve said and make us look bad. It protects our positive face.

For example, let’s imagine that you liked a film but you’re not sure what your friends thought of it. You might choose to use litotes to hedge in this case. It helps you to share your opinion without committing too hard to something that your friends might violently disagree with. It might look something like this:

That film wasn't terrible.

You might also choose to use litotes to hedge when you want to make it clear that you’re a little bit noncommital. You have thoughts, but they aren’t that strong and you’re not too bothered. For example:

I didn't love that book.

If you didn’t really care about the book that much, it might be a bit too strong for you to say you disliked or hated it. So, using litotes can soften your opinion and show that you’re not that serious about it.

Verbal Irony

I mentioned verbal irony a little earlier back in the section about understatement. I gave quite a negative example, so let’s look at a few others.

Let’s say that you went to the best concert of your life. You really enjoyed yourself, danced a lot, maybe even cried a bit. All of your friends saw how much this experience meant to you.

If one of your friends then asks you “So, how do you think the concert went?” they are doing it to ironically acknowledge the fact that you made a huge deal out of it. Then, it is common and funny to respond with even more irony in the form of litotes:

I didn't have the worst time in the world.

Since all your friends know how you reacted, it’s a tongue-in-cheek, lighthearted way to discuss your reaction to the concert. At the risk of killing a joke by overexplaining it, it’s funny because you made it seem like you weren’t that all bothered, but all of your friends know that’s not the case at all. Litotes as verbal irony are actually quite a big part of comedy.

When you use litotes for verbal irony like this, you are flouting Grice’s maxim of quality.

In British English

In British English, we’re infamous for not quite saying what we mean. There are whole newspaper articles dedicated to explaining what we really mean when we say words and phrases! One of the most common phrases people laugh (and complain) about is “not bad”.

This is a really funny example, in my opinion. It shows how pragmatics get involved in litotes. The tone and context really decides whether you’re saying that the thing you’re talking about is mediocre, pretty good, or surprisingly perfect – and not all of those uses of the phrase “not bad” count as litotes!

When you stress and elongate the word “bad”, it sounds like there’s a “but” coming after it. In this case, this wouldn’t be litotes because you’re not using the negation to say the opposite idea.

Then there are the times when someone asks you how you are. You might reply with a simple “not bad” before asking them the same question. This is a classic example of phatic talk. In this case, it is litotes because you’re using the phrase to say that you’re just fine. “Fine” is close enough of an opposite to “bad” for it to count.

On the positive side, there are the times when your teacher might read your work and raise their eyebrows. They nod a little and give you a small smile. When they say “not bad” in that context, they’re basically telling you this was way better than what they expected from you.

I know I always loved to hear my teacher say “not bad”. That was a really affirming, positive example of litotes. It showed that I went soaring beyond their expectations – but we’re too British to go overboard with our praise.

Litotes that Express Unintelligence

People don’t just use litotes to talk about someone who’s done something amazing, though. For some reason, in English, we have loads of idioms that involve litotes and express how unintelligent someone is. You might have heard some of them before! Here are the ones I could think of:

• She’s not the brightest bulb in the box.
• They’re not the sharpest tool in the shed.
• He’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer.
• They’re not the sharpest crayon in the pack.
• She’s not the brightest spark.
• Not the swiftest horse in the stable.

Why is that the case, though? Why do we like to use litotes to call someone unintelligent? Well, I think it has something to do with trying to soften the blow. Questioning someone’s intelligence is not a very nice thing to do. So, we use this device to underplay what we’re saying – implying it rather than name-calling.

They’re also just funny metaphors. They’re easy to come up with for yourself and you can get quite creative with them.

All you need to do is think of some of the adjectives that we use in a figurative way to describe someone as intelligent: bright, swift, sharp, quick, etc. Then, you think about their literal meaning. What is literally “sharp”? Finally, you use litotes to turn your statement into the opposite. There you have it! You’re calling someone unintelligent in a creative way!

Making People Understand That You’re Using Litotes

When you’re using litotes, you’re playing with the semantics of your sentence. You could say that it is a semantic device. Why? Well, because it’s all about what the words mean.

However, that doesn’t mean litotes don’t affect other things. There’s a pragmatic element to them. Whether something counts as litotes or not depends on the context that you say it in. What were people saying just before you used litotes? What goal are you trying to achieve by using it? How are people going to understand the intended implicature?

There’s also a paralinguistic element to them! Whether or not people interpret your words as litotes or just you using negation will depend on how you say your utterance. What tone are you using? What is your facial expression like?

Let’s look at the teacher example I gave you before.

When your teacher says “not bad” after reading your work, they do lots of things with their facial expressions and tone to express that they’re impressed with your work. They raise their eyebrows, nod, smile, etc. That’s clearly an example of litotes.

On the other hand, if they stressed and dragged out the word “bad”, we would expect a “but” to come afterwards. We know that they’re just negating the word to tell us that it’s not completely awful, but it’s still not great. So, it’s not an example of litotes because it’s not being used to express the opposite idea.

When you’re messaging a friend, and you want to use litotes, you might make choices in your graphology to help them catch on. You might use lots of exclamation marks or an emoji.

What is the Difference Between Litotes and Meiosis?

With litotes, you’re using a negative word (negation) to express the opposite idea.

With meiosis, you use words words that make the thing you’re talking about seem smaller than it actually is. For example, you might use quantifiers that minimise the size, such as “a few” or “a little”, adverbs like “just” or “simply”, or a smaller version of what you’re saying. For example, if someone has a gaping wound, you could call it a “scratch’ or a “cut”.

With litotes, you express the exact same idea as if you just said it without the device. “Not happy” means the same as “unhappy”, and “Not the best” is the same as”bad”.

With meiosis, what you’re saying isn’t the reality of the situation. For example, if there’s a storm outside, you might say there are a “few raindrops”. With litotes, you’d say something like, “It’s not sunny”.

Even when you are using litotes to underplay, you’re still telling the truth. It just seems like it’s not as strong of a reaction as you should have.

Litotes	Meiosis
Uses negation/negative words such as “not”, “won’t” and “isn’t”.	Uses minimising words such as “just”, “simply”, “a few”, “a little” and “barely”. Or uses smaller versions of the thing you’re talking about.
Does semantically mean the same thing as the positive version.	Is underplaying reality. Isn’t the same as saying the truth straight.
You have to use negation to make it litotes. It needs a negative word to count.	There are many ways to syntactically make something meiosis – as long as the thing you’re saying is less dramatic than reality.
Can be used to undermine, underplay, diminish or downgrade. However, it can also be used for other purposes such as hedging.	Always used to undermine, underplay, diminish or downgrade something or someone.

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