How does litotes use negation to create emphasis?

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Louisa May Alcott: Little Women — figure of speech Front cover of Louisa May Alcott's classic novel *Little Women*.

Litotes is a figure of speech that achieves emphasis through conscious understatement by expressing an affirmative through the negative of its contrary.123

By negating a term to describe its opposite, the speaker creates a rhetorical effect that often conveys a sense of stoical restraint or nuanced meaning. For example, saying "not bad" to mean "good" or "not uncommon" to mean "common" forces the listener to process the negation, which often results in a more deliberate or emphatic assertion than a simple positive statement would provide.123

This technique is a specific form of meiosis—a general term for understatement—and has historically been a hallmark of Old English poetry and Icelandic sagas, where it contributed to their characteristic tone of reserve.1