Definition:
A rhetorical term for an adjective (or adjective phrase) used to characterize a person or thing. Adjective: epithetic.
A Homeric epithet (also known as fixed or epic) is a formulaic phrase (often a compound adjective) used habitually to characterize a person or thing (for example, "blood-red sky" and "wine-dark sea").
In contemporary usage, epithet often carries a negative connotation and is treated as a synonym for "term of abuse" (as in the expression "racial epithet"). See Safire, below.
See also:
Etymology:
From the Greek, "added"Examples and Observations:
- "Children, I grant, should be innocent; but when the epithet is applied to men, or women, it is but a civil term for weakness."
(Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley) - "In art, all who have done something other than their predecessors have merited the epithet of revolutionary; and it is they alone who are masters."
(Paul Gauguin) - "Bravely bold Sir Robin rode forth from Camelot.
He was not afraid to die,
O brave Sir Robin.
He was not at all afraid to be killed in nasty ways,
Brave, brave, brave, brave Sir Robin! . . .
"Yes, brave Sir Robin turned about
And gallantly, he chickened out.
Bravely taking to his feet,
He beat a very brave retreat,
Bravest of the brave, Sir Robin."
(Monty Python and the Holy Grail, 1974) - "The fixed epithet, a special variety found in epic poetry, is the repeated use of an adjective or phrase for the same subject; thus in Homer's Odyssey, the wife Penelope is always 'prudent,' the son Telemachus is always 'sound minded,' and Odysseus himself is 'many minded.'"
(Stephen Adams, Poetic Designs. Broadview, 1997) - "As a result of the feminist revolution, 'feminine' becomes an abusive epithet."
(Wyndham Lewis) - "[I]t will generally happen, that the Epithets employed by a skillful orator, will be found to be, in fact, so many abridged arguments, the force of which is sufficiently conveyed by a mere hint; e.g. if any one says, 'We ought to take warning from the bloody revolution of France,' the Epithet suggests one of the reasons for our being warned; and that, not less clearly, and more forcibly, than if the argument had been stated at length."
(Richard Whately, Elements of Rhetoric, 6th ed., 1841) - "The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea."
(James Joyce, Ulysses) - "'I am working on a piece about nationalism with a focus on epithet as a smear word,' writes David Binder, my longtime Times colleague, 'which was still a synonym for 'delineation' or 'characterization' in my big 1942 Webster’s but now seems to be almost exclusively a synonym for ‘derogation’ or ‘smear word.’ . . . In the past century, [epithet] blossomed as 'a word of abuse,' today gleefully seized upon to describe political smears."
(William Safire, "Presents of Mind." The New York Times, June 22, 2008) - "[T]he use of epithets in poetry, or even in prose where expressiveness is aimed at, is a danger. If you want to express the terror which something causes, you must not give it an epithet like 'dreadful.' For that describes the emotion instead of expressing it, and your language becomes frigid, that is inexpressive, at once. A genuine poet, in his moments of genuine poetry, never mentions by name the emotions he is expressing."
(R.G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art, 1938)
Pronunciation: EP-i-tet
Also Known As: qualifier
