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Definition of Hyperbole
Hyperbole is a figure of speech in which a writer or speaker exaggerates for the sake of emphasis. Hyperbolic statements are usually quite obvious exaggerations intended to emphasize a point... read full definition
Hyperbole is a figure of speech in which a writer or speaker exaggerates for the sake of emphasis. Hyperbolic statements are usually quite obvious exaggerations... read full definition
Hyperbole is a figure of speech in which a writer or speaker exaggerates for the sake of emphasis. Hyperbolic statements... read full definition
Book 2: Henry Ford’s English-Language Melting Pot
Explanation and Analysis—Human Machines:
In the following example of hyperbole from Chapter 5, Cal/lie blithely refers to 1913 as the year "people stopped being human":
Historical fact: people stopped being human in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They quit in droves, unable to accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since then, however, the adaptation has been passed down: we’ve all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into joysticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds. But in 1922 it was still a new thing to be a machine.
People did not literally "stop being human" after the advent of assembly line manufacturing. Rather, they learned to become machine-compatible in the industrial age. Cal/lie's statement, not to be taken as literal, may reflect on the relationship between labor and industry in early 20th-century America. Industrialization, particularly that which Henry Ford pioneered, sought to make laborers into machine cogs: less than human, therefore easily replaceable, therefore easier to conveniently lay-off and re-hire on a whim.
The narrator also compares this new human "machinery" to an evolutionary adaptation, something required of humanity to survive the industrial era.
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