Meiosis and Litotes
The opposite of hyperbole is understatement, a kind of speech style associated typically with the British. In colloquial and perhaps old fashioned British English, expressions like 'not half" and 'rather' in exclamations mean 'very much indeed.' More usefully, you may hear it said that someone "wasn't very pleased' to mean they were very angry; or that something wasn't very useful (it was totally useless).
This is a very useful politeness strategy for conveying displeasure, disapproval and so on, in formal contexts: "His remarks are not always relevant" (=He talks nonsense), "They don't usually start on time" (=they are always very late), "It may not be safe to eat the salad" (=it's probably full of dangerous germs, because it's uncooked). This figure of speech is called meiosis (pronounced my-oh-sis). One particular form of meiosis is the litotes (pronounced light-o-tease), in which a double negative is used instead of the positive: "She's not unwilling to marry him/
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