Instead of examining a particular individual, this chapter examines a particular episode that occurred during the early period of the Covid pandemic and involved Johnson’s minister of health, Matt Hancock. The minister set himself the target of achieving a hundred thousand Covid tests daily and he claimed to have succeeded. Critics suggested that he had used a measure that exaggerated the number of tests carried out. The UKSA was asked to comment whether Hancock’s claims were statistically and verbally justified. We look at the public correspondence between the UKSA’s chair and the minister. The UKSA’s chair starts by writing in a diplomatic manner, implying but not directly asserting that the number of tests may have been exaggerated. Hancock in his reply ignores the hints. So do most of the national newspapers. The UKSA’s chair in a second letter upped his rhetoric. This time the national press reported the letter and newspapers sided with the UKSA’s chair, ‘the national watchdog’, and directly accusing Hancock of misusing statistics. The minister backed down, but he still hid the statistics which would have shown whether he achieved his target. We can see that the UKSA is not powerless if it recruits the press but it cannot force ministers to apologise.

Hyperbole is a trope with close relations to irony. People use hyperbole to overly exaggerate the reality of some situation, which implicitly communicates their attitudes toward that topic or event. Barnden specifically argues that hyperbole is another example of “irony-as-affect-expression” in which a hyperbolic statement, such as “Peter has millions of pets,” is not an exaggeration about the number of pets Peter owns, but exaggerates the discrepancy between what some person believes about Peter’s pets and the number of pets Peter really owns. In this manner, hyperbole increases the intensity of “the affect cargo” (e.g., the speaker’s affective purpose in saying “Peter has millions of pets”) beyond that of the cargo (e.g., the actual number of Peter’s pets), which could have been expressed by a nonexaggerating utterance (e.g., “Peter has many pets”). Barnden considers several types of “affect types in ironic cargo,” including contempt, bitterness, criticism, teasing, as well as annoyance, disappointment, regret, relief, and gladness. More generally, irony, including hyperbole, offers far more potential for expressing complex affective states than does nonirony.

Chapter 10 begins with an overview of previous, mostly telic treatments of play, contrasted with a “for its own sake,” paratelic approach.It discusses juvenile play, then adult play, including the play of animals in the wild.Much of the chapter focuses on language play, and on the function of play in conversation.The discussion throughout emphasizes the intrinsic motivation for play while acknowledging its contributions to individual and group homeostasis.