A World of Exaggeration!

By LANCE MORROW

Exaggeration is an intoxication of words. Language temporarily loses its self-control; it veers around ther room making drunken passes at reality, biting its ear, whispering hyperhole, evem drooloing a little; YOUR SEARING GUT-WRENCING WORK IS THE LITERALLY EVENT OF THE DECADE . . .SPELLBINDING . . . MAGNIFICENT. . . A WASHDAY MIRACLE, WHITER THAN WHITE . . . A NEW STANDARD BY WHICH ALL THOROUGHBRED DRIVING MACHINES WILL BE MEASURED . . . I WILL NEVER LIE TO YOU . . . I AM NOT A CROOK. I WILL BALANCE THE FEDERAL BUDGET . . . WE'LL GET MARRIED AS SOON AS THE DIVORCE COMES THORUGH . . . such episodes leave a man feeling like a fool in the morning they are the effusions of the moment, wild blossoms with a short but extravagant life.

in events of world-class exaggeration, the tongue likes to disconnect itself from the past and race off obviously astride any passing enthusiasm, like toad of toad hall. A modest example occured during the trial of Elvis Presley's doctor in memphis a few weeks ago; Elvis was fervently described as a musical genius." genius is one of the choice words of breathlessness; if presley was a musical genius what are we to say to Bethevon ? last week a reviewer in the New York Times wrote that "the fecundity of the beatles is a phenomenon unmatched in the history of popular culture." The information may have sorrowed Homer, Shakespeare, Dickens, Rodgers and Hammerstein and Cecil B. DeMille.

The '60's (from which the Beatles appropriately sprang) were an era of fine, ripe exaggeration--all of that bright, angry, lulu rhetoric parading in costume across the counterculture and the war zone,en route to conciouseness III. America was amerika. the young were "freaks", the police were "pigs" a hundred different chemical substances were on hand to perform radical exaggerations in the brain. The 80's seem to be taking a preppier line with reality; certain voices run to understatement now. Still, a great deal of exaggeration has been built into the culture and, of course, the traditional home of exaggeration; politics. Ronald Reagan so far is not doing his part, however, in 1977, Jimmy Carter described the Shah's Iran as an island of stability." when the Apollo 11 astronauts returned from the moon, Richard Nixon declared, "This is the greatest week in the history of the world since the Creation."

Most excesses do not display the exaggerator's art in it's best light: they are merely blurbs and rodomontade. 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 debunk, 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. 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.

Americans have historically (with a touch of of overstatement) regarded themselves as the world's master exaggerators: spinners of all tall tales, an abundantly fabulous people, full of Whitman and vinegar. But this is probably mere cultural narcissism. Other people have spent many centuries perfecting their techniques of overstatment. The French for all their Cartesian precision have a strangely unstable hyperbolic side; a casual acquaintance who cannot make it to lunch one day will tell you he is "desolate" because of it. Such linguistic inflation can leave people with their vocabularies depleted when hard times come; what is that man say of his condition if, say, his wife dies?

The Germans have a deep national habit of earnest exaggeration. The Japanese, of course, practice a style of negative exageration--self-abnegation so elaborate as to be a kind of overstatement. On Aug. 15, 1945, Emperor Hirohito observed in the imperial announcement of Japan's surrender: "The war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage." The British exaggerate in the same direction, indulging in what grammarians call meiosis--understatement. It was an American (born in Wales), however, Henry Stanley, who produced the wonderfully meiotic: "Dr. Livingstone, I presume."

Of the world's exaggerators, none surpasses the Arabs, whose language is a symphony of poetical excess. A Cairo gas station attendant greets his co-workers in the morning: "May your day be scented with jasmine." Sometimes the exaggerations that are inherent in Arabic can be dangerous. Saudi Arabia's late King Saud once told a visiting group of Palestinian journalists that "the Arabs must be ready to sacrifice a million lives to regain the sacred soil of Palestine." It was rhetoric, a flourish; Arabs hearing it would no more take it literally than would an American football crowd hearing "Rip 'em Up, tear 'em up." But the words made headlines all over the world as a statement of bloody Saudi intent.

The great difficulty with all exaggerations is that while most of the audience may understand that excess and embellishment 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 involved, and how much truth. If 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. The very idea of exaggeration presupposes some discoverable, objective reality; 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. Still, in the late 20th century, where reality is not stable, where it is instead erratic, skittish, apocalyptic, discontinuous, monstrously surprising (the Holocaust, for example, was an event far beyond the vocabularies of exaggeration), then it is hard to know what is an overstatement and what is not.

But distinctions must be made. There are time when exaggerations are highly useful; there are times when they may be fatal. A partial list:

DO NOT EXAGGERATE: 1) When performing neurosurgery; 2) in writing military dispatches (before the battle); 3) on job applications (if you are clumsy and may get caught); 4) when running the Bureau of the Budget; 5) in marriage.

EXAGGERATION MAY BE HELPFUL: 1) In lovemaking and courtship; 2) in leading a cavalry charge; 3) when speaking at funerals; 4) when defending a murderer; 5) in military dispatches (after the battle; 6) in political speeches; 7) when writing thank-you notes. --By Lance Morrow

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