#365DaysOfWriting – Day Fifty-Seven
Hyperbole.
A figure of speech that has been abused to no end. I’ve heard at least a million people use it in the last 24 hours. Oops, see what I did there?
Most people don’t even pronounce it properly. It’s ‘hyper-blee’ and people say ‘hyper-bol’.
Why do human beings like hyperbole so much?
Well, think of the whole world like a News Hour segment by Arnab Goswami. Everybody’s trying to make a point. No one wants to listen to each other. You can’t survive in a situation like that without some hyperbole. Throw in an outrageous comment or a ridiculous fact and suddenly everyone pays you attention. Hyperbole means ‘exaggerated statements or claims not meant to be taken seriously’. But it’s only in our world that exaggerated statements or claims are taken seriously. I mean, we have an entire Guinness Book of World Records as proof, for heaven’s sake!
It’s a habit that dates back to childhood.
Children are prone to hyperbole, given their vivid imagination. I remember the times when my friends and I would discuss what our fathers did for work. The conversation would start with an over-simplified job description (my dad counts money at work) and would generally end up being a discussion of physical feats of strength (my dad can lift a car with his hands). We can’t help it – we need to outdo each other in terms of sheer magnitude or scale, and it is in such situations that hyperbole helps.
Our films are the epitome of hyperbole.
(Again, another word pronounced wrongly on most occasions: epitome (ep-i-tuh-me) not (epi-tome))
Check out any Rajnikanth movie. Or an SRK-starrer. It’s either the situation or song or dialogue that’s in hyperbole. Sometimes all three put together. But as they say, art imitates life. Let’s take Gangs of Wasseypur for instance.
“अगर हमारे बेटे को कुछ हो जाता तो इतना गोली मारते, की आपका ड्राइवर भी ख़ाली खोका बेच-बेचकर रईस बन जाता।”
It’s said by Sardar Khan, and it basically means – if anything had happened to my son, I would’ve put so many bullets in you, that even your driver would’ve become rich just by selling empty shells.
I rest my case. Hyperbole is an inescapable way of life for us. So much so that one day, it may become mandatory to use it in every sentence.
