Showing posts with label hyperbole. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hyperbole. Show all posts

9.07.2024

talk it up

Blurbs and other forms of rodomontade...

"No industry [film industry] did more to destroy the meaning of words. The follies are too familiar to need laboring here—how the story of a couple of cowboys quarreling over a girl became an epic, the tale of a small-time 'hoofer' a deathless saga. Colossal, terrific, stupendous—these words became the small change of film advertising. A reservation was put on a whole series of other adjectives like throbbing, rending, tingling, pulsating, pounding, sizzling, scorching, stark, elemental, volcanic, and searing. No story was ever taken from life—it was ripped or torn from the mighty canvas of humanity."

—E.S. Turner, The Shocking History of Advertising! (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1953)

4.16.2024

no high claims

Poetry needs no high claims because it’s poetry and that is enough.

4.09.2016

bestest mostest etc

Hyberbollocks: Exaggerated nonsensical praise, often evidenced by the author’s blurbs.

7.07.2009

no favor to the reader

One of those breathless hyperbolic introductions that no poet could or should have to read up to.