litotes

I had never heard the word litotes, which means “words doctors use to remind you they’re smarter than you are.”

If you were feeling technical, you might call it "litotes" and Milton pulls a similar trick in his line: "Love, not the lowest end of human life".

It's outlined in general and unemotional terms in the climactic sixth and seventh stanzas, with a faint touch of extra-dry humour in the litotes of "pointed questions", "whoever they had come to see", etc.

V.—I pardon this epitrope, but pray use less metaphor and more litotes in the prosopography you dedicate to my modest entity— J.—What will you?

The use of tmesis, asyndeton, anacoluthon, aposiopesis, hyperbaton, hyperbole, litotes, in Latin oratory and poetry.