GRE word list

draggle \DRAG-uhl\, verb

1. To soil by dragging over damp ground or in mud.

2. To trail on the ground; be or become draggled.

3. To follow slowly; straggle.

No skirts to hold up, or to draggle their wet folds against my ankles; no stifling veil flapping in my face, 

and blinding my eyes; no umbrella to turn inside out, but instead, the cool rain driving slap into my face…

-- Fanny Fern, Ruth Hall and Other Writing

You can't run through the streets after the water baths in that thing you draggle around the house.

-- Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, Anya

Draggle is obviously related to this more common word drag. It entered English in the late 1400s. The 

suffix -le is a verb formation from Middle English, also seen in dazzle and twinkle, among others.

litotes \LAHY-tuh-teez\, noun

Understatement, especially that in which an affirmative is expressed by the negative of its contrary, as in “not bad at all.”

Stevens does not allow himself much of the Sublime here, yet it creeps in by negation in the litotes or understatement of the stanza's close.

-- Harold Bloom, Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate

I know it's a textbook example of what lit-crit geeks like to call litotes, a figure of speech in which an affirmative is expressed through the negation of its opposite…

-- Mark Dery, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts

Litotes comes from the Greek word litótes which meant "plainness, simplicity."