 Have you ever been in a conversation in which a person has said something like, I haven't seen you in a thousand years, or that workout was so exhausting, my feet are going to fall off, or I am so hungry that I could eat all the food in this restaurant? None of those statements could literally be true. No human stomach, for example, can hold the entire food supply of a busy restaurant. Rather than aiming for real-life accuracy, all those expressions are examples of hyperbole, or the art of using exaggeration to convey an amplified personal response. In addition to hearing examples of hyperbole all the time in common speech, hyperbole is also an important part of literary prose, dramatic writing, and poetry. The term hyperbole has ancient origins. It combines one Greek term that means over, and another one that means cast or throw. So hyperbole describes the sense of overreaching, or grasping beyond what is necessary in order to describe a certain feeling, experience, or response. There's a great example of hyperbole in the famous scene from Romeo and Juliet, in which Romeo sees his true love on her balcony in the moonlight. Since falling in love is by no means an everyday experience, Romeo must communicate with language that reaches past the everyday. He sees her looking up at the sky and he says, two of the fairest stars in all the heavens, having some business to entreat her eyes to twinkle in their spheres till they return. Without hyperbole, you'd have to hear Romeo saying something more grounded and realistic, like, oh, I find myself significantly attracted to that appealing-looking young lady. Her eyes are very beautiful indeed. But thankfully, Shakespeare instead employs hyperbole so that Romeo can describe her eyes as bright enough to make the stars in the sky want to offer her a job. Then Romeo says, her eyes in heaven would through the airy regions stream so bright that birds would sing and think it were not night. Juliet's eyes to Romeo are so gobsmackingly beautiful that they could be put in the sky in place of the stars, which is an impossible concept. And what's more, Romeo says that if her eyes were up there in the dark sky with the Big Dipper and Cassiopeia, all the sleeping birds on the planet would feel the light that they cast and think that the sun had risen and then start chirping. And as science will confirm, no eyes in human history have ever been bright enough to serve as a bird wake-up call. But the hyperbolic claim that Romeo makes in that special moment helps the audience understand that what he's feeling is anything but commonplace. Simply looking at Juliet is an experience so overwhelming that it defies logic. And anyone who's ever fallen madly in love will probably confirm that it's by no means an everyday experience. Rational speech cannot describe it. You need hyperbole to convey the sense that what's happening is larger than life.