Overgeneralization

"George Orwell put the easy use of words like 'unique' under the headings of 'pretentious diction' and overgeneralization.

Fortunately for all of us, the rhetoric of both cultural pessimism and postmodernism contains more than its fair share of exaggeration and overgeneralization.

It's an overgeneralization to say that everywhere you look is the hand of man in the presettlement era," says Thomas Swetnam, a fire ecologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson.