British public life has long maintained an uneasy (0) TRUCE with the rhetorical virtue of understatement. To describe a catastrophe as "a spot of bother", or a brilliant performance as "not bad at all", is to a code whose conventions are easily mistaken for insincerity by those unfamiliar with them. Far from being a of feeling, such linguistic restraint signals a confidence that the listener will do the interpretive work — that the actual magnitude of the claim can be inferred from the gap between the words used and the situation described. To the gap is, in effect, to confer on one's interlocutor the flattering assumption of sufficient intelligence to do so. Foreign commentators, notoriously, have this wrong with some regularity. The American tendency to call a merely competent dinner "amazing" or a tolerable film "incredible" can seem, to the British ear, to the very currency of evaluative language. If everything is superlative, nothing is; the exhausted vocabulary can no longer the extraordinary from the ordinary when both are described in identical terms. Of course, understatement too can into mannerism, and the person who reflexively describes a triumph as "perfectly acceptable" may simply be affecting modesty rather than practising it. The rhetorical art, as with all refined performances, in calibration: saying a little less than one means, but not so much less that meaning evaporates altogether.