hyperbole is an understatement -or- what will metacritique say about this?
perhaps in your sixth grade production of all aboard the gastrointestinal tract, you earned high praise and many kudos in your school’s newspaper for your absorbing portrayal of a wincing ileocecal valve. but was that review as bombastic or as tumid as the following one (dated may 30, 1784) from an irish newspaper which describes a performance by sarah siddons (the most popular tragedienne of the 1700s):
On Saturday, Mrs. Siddons, about whom all the world had been talking, exposed her beautiful, adamantine, soft, and lovely person, for the first time, at Smock-Alley Theatre, in the bewitching, melting, and all-tearful character of ” Isabella.”
She was nature itself! She was the most exquisite work of art! She was the very daisy, primrose, tuberose, sweet-brier, furze-blossom, gilliflower, wallflower, cauliflower, auricula, and rosemary ! In short, she was the bouquet of Parnassus. Where expectation was raised so high, it was thought she would be injured by her appearance; but it was the audience who were injured : several fainted before the curtain drew up! When she came to the scene of parting with her wedding-ring, ah ! what a sight was there ! the very fiddlers in the orchestra, albeit unused to the melting mood, blubbered like hungry children crying for their bread and butter; and when the bell rang for music between the acts, the tears ran from the bassoon-player’s eyes in such plentiful showers that they choked the finger-stops, and, making a spout of the instrument, poured in such torrents on the first fiddler’s book, that, not seeing the overture was in two sharps, the leader of the band actually played in one flat. But the sobs and sighs of the groaning audience, and the noise of corks drawn from the smelling-bottles, prevented the mistake between flats and sharps being discovered.
One hundred and nine ladies fainted, forty-six went into fits, and ninety-five had strong hysterics ! The world will scarcely credit the truth when they are told that fourteen children, five old women, one hundred tailors, and six common-councilmen were actually drowned in the inundation of tears that flowed from the galleries, the slips, and the boxes to increase the briny pond in the pit; the water was three feet deep; and the people were obliged to stand upon the benches, and were in that position up to their ankles in tears! An act of Parliament against her playing any more will certainly pass.
there comes a point in hyperbole, just as there comes a point in a hyperbola, when things start reversing themselves and your well-intended praise quickly plunges towards unrelenting contempt.
