The Joys Of Hyperbole

It is a great word; its Greek roots mean to take a great big old (hyper) throw. Toss a big blanket of exaggeration over something. For an old softball player, that sounds like a lot of fun! Using hyperbole is, in fact, a very effective way to emphasize that something is incredibly important, more important than precision. To say something is a million, or billion, times more important than something else conjures up an image so all-encompassing that it is hard to shake it from my memory. I could color the words bright red and put them in a dramatic font, too, but there is nothing like a bigger-than-life metaphor to draw attention. Print advertisers like to do all three. If I were writing a poem, I would probably use hyperbole at some point to enlarge the passions of whatever I was describing. Where passions are involved, hyperbole cannot be far behind!