Rhetoric and figures of speech

The sixteenth entry is a hipérbole, and English holds that word twice over. Both of its forms go back to one Greek noun, hyperbolē, a throwing beyond, and English took it in along two separate roads. « Hyperbole » arrived through rhetoric and names the deliberate overstatement of this entry, as in « I have told you a thousand times ». « Hyperbola » arrived through mathematics and names the open curve that a plane cuts from a cone, the one whose two branches never meet. They are spelt differently, they are never swapped, and — the part that catches every reader who has met the word only in print — they are not pronounced alike. « Hyperbola » behaves. « Hyperbole » has four syllables, carries the stress on the second and ends in a vowel sound, so anyone who makes it rhyme with « bowl » is heard out at once. Portuguese split nothing at all: a hipérbole is the figure in a literature lesson and the curve in a geometry lesson, and the subject on the timetable does all the work that two English spellings do.