litotish

Wow. Vocabulary word from English class?

By the way, it doesn't mean quite what you want it to mean. First, the statement would be ``litotish'' (if that's even a word -- I'm not sure you can get there from litotes -- litotesish or litotesy might be better -- but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt), not him. And it wouldn't be unless he'd phrased it as a double-negative or contrapositive. Like ``they're not that small''. And even then, it wouldn't really be ``litotish'', as he wasn't inversely exaggerating, as in ``the Beatles weren't exactly a small band.''