When I was at school, we studied Alexander Pope’s satirical poem “The Rape of the Lock.”  It is to epic poems what Friends is to Romeo and Juliet.  He was the master of comic exaggeration.  There’s a lovely line in the poem, that still sticks with me, where he descibes Belinda’s dressing table: “puffs, powders, patches, bibles, billet-doux.”  Billet-doux are love letters and by putting them at the end he wants us to understand that they are more important to our heroine that make up or the Bible.

I saw the same technique used in the latest issue of The Atlantic in an article about Rudolph Giuliani: “for a few moments the business seminar has taken on shades of something deeper, more meaningful - a great political speech, church, Oprah.“  The same thing as Pope.  Lovely.