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Hyperbole is when you use obvious, extreme exaggerations. Going one unit past "completely plausible" is a confused, weak use of the technique.

For example, I wouldn't call it hyperbole (or effective writing) if you referred to an interest rate of 45% as 55% "to emphasize how big it is".


Agreed. It's kind of distracting because, when you read it, you start thinking, "is that right?" My immediate thought was to go look up with Mosaic came out and determine if there were graphical browsers before that, which, I think, is not what the author intended.


I have that problem generally, where I will automatically think of plausible interpretations of what someone is saying (like, here, imagining that early graphical browsers e.g. for minitel looked like this), and thus often can't tell if someone is joking.


"graphical browser" is anachronistic, but there were certainly graphical interfaces for online services before the web was a thing. I wasn't using them until the early 90s, but someone must have, in the 80s.


The original browser is graphical.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb


It's similar to how there's a notion that all websites from the mid 90s were full of marquee tags and MIDI music and everything was in Comic Sans.




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