Meiosis

Meiosis is "a euphemistic figure of speech that intentionally understates something or implies that it is lesser in significance or size" than it really is, from the Greek "to make smaller, to diminish". Where litotes understates by negation, meiosis understates by shrinking the noun itself: history gives it "peculiar institution" for slavery, "The Recent Unpleasantness" for a civil war, "The Troubles" for thirty years of conflict, and everyday English "The Pond" for the Atlantic Ocean. It is often compared to litotes and stands as the opposite of overstatement, the quiet twin of hyperbole.

For the novelist meiosis is characterization in miniature: the battle-scarred veteran who calls a war "a disagreement", the billionaire who lives in "the cottage". The gap between word and fact is the voice, and readers hear irony in it, sometimes affection, sometimes contempt.