Are You suprised ?

E.g. Are these the remedies for a starving and desperate populace?
Litotes is a SD consisting of a peculiar use of negative constructions. The negation plus noun or adjective serves to establish a positive feature in a person or thing. This positive feature, however, is diminished in quality as compared with a synonymous expression making a straightforward assertion of the positive feature. Lets compare the following two pairs of sentences:

E.g. It’s not a bad thing. = It’s a good thing.

E.g. He is no coward. = He is a brave man.

‘Not bad’ is not equal to ‘good’ although the two constructions are synonymous. The same can be said about the 2^nd pair, no coward and ‘a brave man’. In both cases the negative construction is weaker than the affirmative one. Still we cannot say that the two negative constructions produce a lesser effect than the corresponding affirmative ones, just on the contrary. The stylistic effect of litotes depends mainly on intonation.

E.g. He was not without taste. It troubled him not a little. He found that this was no easy task.

A variant of litotes is a construction with two negations, as in ‘not unlike’, ‘not unpromising’, not displeased’, etc

Litotes is used in different styles of speech, excluding those, which may be called matter-of-fact styles, official style and scientific prose.