File under “Exaggeration, Playing the Over/Under”: Let’s not overstate the power of overoverstatement.
“Overexaggeration is redundant!,” the persnickitors cry. (They always use exclamation points.) Not necessarily. Overexaggeration might simply be guilty of hyperbole.
To exaggerate is to overstate. Now. One early meaning of exaggerate was simply “to pile up”; the meaning of “pile up too much” came shortly afterward. And now, to those claiming that overexaggerate is to over-redundate (I know, not a word, but it should be), and that the word really means “overoverstate”:
To exaggerate is to overstate for effect. To overexaggerate is to take the overstatement a step or more too far—to, potentially, take an exaggeration past the point of legitimate and reasonable overstatement to make a point. If I say that I receive a truckload of junk mail each week, I am exaggerating. If I say that this morning I received every piece of junk mail ever created, and the delivery just emshed my car, I’m overexaggerating. Here’s another case where using the word over ex . . . well, I’m not going to use the word again, because
122
Bill Brohaugh
one more reference to this unusual word would likely crush my other car.