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Updated: May 13, 2025
Our characteristic humor of understatement, and our equally characteristic humor of overstatement, are both likely to be cheery at bottom, though the mere wording may be grim enough. No popular saying is more genuinely characteristic of American humor than the familiar "Cheer up. The worst is yet to come."
I had been indulging in a little legitimate puffery in saying the inoculant worked miracles, but if anything that had been an understatement. It just went to show how impossible it is for a real salesman to be too enthusiastic. Nerves in knees and fingers quivering, I walked over to join the group curiously inspecting the translated lawn.
"Mr. Ravick is at Hunters' Hall," he said. "He thought it would be unwise to make a public appearance just now." Oh, brother, what an understatement! "There seems to be a lot of public feeling against him, due to some misconception that he was responsible for what happened to Captain Kivelson's ship. Of course, that is absolutely false. Mr. Ravick had absolutely nothing to do with that.
Rick thought that was an understatement. "They questioned him for a while. Who were the divers and what were they after? Orvil played dumb. He said he knew nothing about divers and of course he had seen bubbles. He always saw bubbles. Marsh gas was rising all the time. He couldn't understand what all the shooting was about." "Good for Orvil," Scotty muttered.
Grady's description of the horrible look on his face was, if anything, an understatement. As I stood with my eyes riveted on the horror-stricken face on the floor, Kennedy had been quietly going over the furniture and carpet about the body. "Look!" he exclaimed at last, scarcely turning to us. On the chair, the writing-table, and even on the walls were little pitted marks and scratches.
In reading this diary one is much charmed with its constant understatement of romantic and perilous incidents and conditions. But the original penciled pages show that, even in copying, the strong bent of the writer to be brief has often led to the exclusion of facts that enhance the interest of exciting situations, and sometimes the omission robs her own heroism of due emphasis.
"We will exchange stories over coffee, eh? The Mena House is close by, and I have a car." "So do we," Rick said. "We came in Hassan's car." "Then let us drive down in our separate cars and meet there. We have much to talk over." That was an understatement, Rick thought.
Not until she no longer had a maid did she comprehend. To a woman who has never had a maid, or who has taken on a maid as a luxury, it will seem an exaggeration to say that Mildred felt as helpless as a baby lying alone in a crib before it has learned to crawl. Yet that is rather an understatement of her plight. The maid left in the afternoon.
Every one was glad and relieved, but every one took the change as a matter of course; the attitude of every one to the youth was: "Well, it's not too soon!" No one saw a romantic miracle. "I suppose you haven't got `The Light of Asia' in stock?" began Janet Orgreave, after she had greeted the youth kindly. "I'm afraid we haven't, miss," said Stifford. This was an understatement.
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.
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