问答题 Exaggeration is an intoxication of words. Language temporarily loses its self-con- trol. In events of world-class exaggeration, the tongue likes to disconnect itself from the past and race off obviously astride any passing enthusiasm. Most excesses do not display the exaggerator's art in it's best light: they are merely blurbs and boasts. (46)In more complex usage, exaggeration does dynamic and suggestive work: it can be used to frighten or threaten, to reassure (oneself or others), to glorify, and, above all, to relieve the tedium of life to entertain.
Exaggeration is one of the methods of all myth--from Olympian deities to giants like Paul Bunyan and John Henry, to mythic historical figures--Mao, say, or George Patton. (47)A child exaggerates his parents' powers to the point of myth; heroes and caricatures, of course, is based on the artists method of exaggerating one feature in proportion to the others.
(48)The great difficulty with all exaggerations is that while most of the audience may understand that excess and ornament are in the air, and may automatically do a mental calculation discounting the rhetoric, the fact is that different auditors discount at different rates. It is often difficult to know just how much exaggeration is in- volved, and how much truth, ff Iranians pumping their fists in the air describe the U. S. the "Great Satan," how much of that is homicidal hostility, how much is merely Persian literary style?
In simplest definition, exaggeration is a form of lying. Is it therefore bad, an instrument of untruth? It depends. Sometimes the artful exaggeration is a way of evoking, of discovering, an essential truth lying below the prosaic surface of things. (49)The very idea of exaggeration supposes some discoverable, objective reality in advance, so the task of the human eye and scientific intelligence, in this classic view, would be to describe that reality as dispassionately and accurately as possible.
The world has its being outside the fanciful brain of the exaggerator, a romantic whose business is to distort reality. (50)Still, in the late 20th century, where reality is not stable, where it is instead discontinuous, mon- strously surprising, then it is hard to know what is an overstatement and what is not The Holocaust, for example, was an event far beyond the vocabularies of exaggeration. Nevertheless, distinctions must be made; there are times when exaggerations are highly useful; there are times when they may be fatal.