Hypobole

Today I wondered if the antonym of hyperbole might be hypobole. Like the Apollo 13 report "Ok, Houston, we've had a problem here". Or my Peruvian friend's account of a Shining Path massacre of an entire village: "Naturally the villagers were not too happy after that". My friend was a master of that verbal art.

It turns out that hypobole is a real word, but means something different, to anticipate objections for the purpose of refuting them later. Understatement is probably the closest to what I wanted, with a couple of related terms like litotes and melosis.

FOBI

You probably know the acronym FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) (on news, bargains, etc). Today I found the term for a concept that's been fermenting in my head: Fear of Becoming Irrelevant (FOBI) . My original search term was Fear of Loss of Relevance (FOLOR), but FOBI is more memorable and also generates more results from a search.

Anybody can have FOBI at any time, but it probably is more likely to be associated with a life change, such as retirement. It probably explains a lot of activity on forums where people, who were experts when they were working, try hard to maintain their status with long dissertations.

Suggestions for dealing with FOBI are numerous and varied. What works depends on the individual. For me the course taken by the author of the article linked to sounds good to me; just do what you feel is valuable, live in the moment and let go of the outcome.

Smoocheroso

I've found my word of the day: smoocheroso.

It was used to describe a couple of performances on the now defunct Radio National program The Planet.

https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/archived/dailyplanet/jenny-game-lopata--bennie-wallace/3408848

If you like smoocheroso, sensuous tenor saxophone, it's hard to imagine anything more appetizing than "The Nearness of You".

https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/archived/weekendplanet/richard-galliano-and-maria-kalaniemi/3306210

RICHARD GALLIANO (NEW YORK TRIO) - ’RUBY, MY DEAR’ (one of the world’s greatest accordionists, ’live’, & smoocheroso with ac bassist Larry Grenadier & the brushes of drummer Clarence Penn.

So it has been used to describe tenor saxophone and accordion performances. It sounds like a medley of smooth and smooch, with the Spanish suffix to turn it into an adjective. There are few occurrences of the word on the Internet and no definition, but you can infer what it implies.