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.
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