[75]
Hyperbole is employed even
by peasants and uneducated persons, for the good
reason that everybody has an innate passion for
exaggeration or attenuation of actual facts, and no
one is ever contented with the simple truth. But
such disregard of truth is pardonable, for it does not
involve the definite assertion of the thing that is not.
Hyperbole is, moreover, a virtue,
Quintilian. With An English Translation. Harold Edgeworth Butler. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1922.
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