United States or Lesotho ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
It's the English policy in a line: We don't threaten, and we don't wish to be threatened by another. Let them fire if they like, that's all in the game. But don't swing a gun on us with a threat. St. Alban was lucky to say it. He got the reserve, the restraint, the commonplace understatement that England affects, into the sentence. It was a piece of good fortune to catch the thing like that.
"An unpleasantness that would have hampered me rather badly." "That's the understatement of the year! Well, if you agree it won't be too useful, maybe we'd better drop it and get on with the darlas and shield training. I can always go into medicine later, when we aren't pushed for time." "I must agree. Healing will probably be most valuable, but it is hardly something useful in combat.
With more subtle and restrained artistry than M. Barbusse, the author has portrayed the simple chronicles of many of his comrades. He employs only the plainest notation of speech, with an economy not unlike that of Maupassant, and the indictment is the more terrible because of this emphasis of understatement.
It is bad enough, in all conscience, to be insulted, but the truth of an insult is the barb that prevents its retraction. 'Truth hurts' has all the pathos of understatement. It not only hurts, but infuriates. It has no more right to go naked in public than any one else.
"Ochsner! what sort of a ship is that?" Ground Control's startled voice came over the annunciator. "It's an old one," Kennon said. "That's a gross understatement. Stand by for boarders. Ambulance coming up." Kennon opened the airlock and two radiation-suited men entered.
One night oh, oftener than that, but let us say one for the value of understatement returning to our quarters some time before midnight, we stepped out upon the balcony to gaze across into that garden. The sky was clear, the neighborhood silent. A wind stirred, but the shrubberies stood motionless.
But it would be a grievous understatement of the case to omit the most direct benefit of all, the unspeakable gain in private happiness to the liberated half of the species; the difference to them between a life of subjection to the will of others, and a life of rational freedom. After the primary necessities of food and raiment, freedom is the first and strongest want of human nature.
It is insisted that eight duels a week four for each of the two days is too low an average to draw a calculation from, but I will reckon from that basis, preferring an understatement to an overstatement of the case.
Early in the war the disbursing agent reported that there were only three thousand Indians, including Negroes, to be considered; but this was clearly an understatement. Within the next year and a half the Indians were hard pressed, and before the end of this period the notorious Thomas S. Jessup had appeared on the scene as commanding major general.
Of course, it was not pleasant for the girl to hear of the family scandal, and she set herself to minimise the matter, a task for which she was eminently qualified, raised fashionably under a comfortable mother and a father whose nerves might not be shaken, and for many years the wife of Montague Dartie. Her description was a masterpiece of understatement.
Word Of The Day