Yellow like a geisha gown, denial all the way
Exaggeration means to make something seem larger, better, worse, etc than it really is. It is beyond limits of truth that creates doubt. It is a negative factor. So everybody is afraid of it. But nobody can avoid it. It causes irritation. It causes annoyance. Thus exaggerated remarks ultimately aggravate the target person. A fool or a wicked person exaggerates. A wise person neither fabricates the fact nor manufactures a new one. Similarly an innocent soul describes a fact unchanged and states it as it is.
Human nature is to exaggerate to gain something. This gain may either be classical or commercial or both simultaneously. Everybody tries to magnify his good traits and minimize his faults thus to win both ways. Emotion makes one blind. It kills clarity of thought. It escorts a lover in the kingdom of romance, far from the madding crowd. Emotion of the lover exaggerates the good traits of his fiancée hundred times and allures to love her. Later on when emotion is replaced by reality then faults of fiancée are exaggerated thousand times automatically and compel him to depart her mercilessly. Both of these events are striking examples of exaggeration and happen at the beckon of emotion. Exaggeration when is rendered for mere enjoyment, there lies no problem. At that jovial moment fact is fabricated and colored as per the sweet will of the narrators. Each of the narrators joins the competition of exaggeration. Since, they have no base and no brake at all, they stretch the truth with immense power of imagination. But it is too bad if this is used as a weapon to defame or harm to others.
Man beats his own drum with much intensity to gain name, fame and win the game. Due to exaggeration original story remains a mystery. As such they say, in history the names are real but the fact is either full of intentional exaggeration or suppression or both. So it is the topic of research to the scholars to find out the truth. Problem arises if a single topic is exaggerated differently by different scholars.
{ Dibakar Pal, Of Exaggeration, 2011 | SSRN | Continue reading }
