Ass'n v. Bresler (1970), Letter Carriers v. Austin (1974) and Milkovich v. Lorain Journal Co. (1989) are notable cases.
In Watts v. United States (1969) the defendant was absolved of federal anti-threat punishment for saying "the first person he would put in his scope is L.B.J.
Modern tall tales also make use of hyperbole to exaggerate the feats and characteristics of their protagonists.
Emerson's Concord Hymn uses hyperbole in the lines "Here once the embattled farmers stood / And fired the shot heard round the world."
In Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, the protagonist emerges from his shelter to find total destruction, and makes the hyperbolic statement that "Dresden was like the moon now, nothing but minerals."
It became a controversial issue when millennials began to convolute literally by using the word to artificially substantiate a position.
[12] Many dictionaries now document the meaning as "to acknowledge that something is not literally true but is used for emphasis or to express strong feeling".