Rhetoric   

eye or some other physical sense. It is better, for instance, to say
'rosy-fingered morn', than 'crimson-fingered' or, worse still,
'red-fingered morn'. The epithets that we apply, too, may have a bad
and ugly aspect, as when Orestes is called a 'mother-slayer'; or a
better one, as when he is called his 'father's avenger'. Simonides,
when the victor in the mule-race offered him a small fee, refused to
write him an ode, because, he said, it was so unpleasant to write odes
to half-asses: but on receiving an adequate fee, he wrote
"Hail to you, daughters of storm-footed steeds? "
though of course they were daughters of asses too. The same effect is
attained by the use of diminutives, which make a bad thing less bad
and a good thing less good. Take, for instance, the banter of
Aristophanes in the Babylonians where he uses 'goldlet' for 'gold',
'cloaklet' for 'cloak', 'scoffiet' for 'scoff, and 'plaguelet'. But
alike in using epithets and in using diminutives we must be wary and
must observe the mean.
Part 3
Bad taste in language may take any of four forms:
(1) The misuse of compound words. Lycophron, for instance, talks of
the 'many visaged heaven' above the 'giant-crested earth', and again
the 'strait-pathed shore'; and Gorgias of the 'pauper-poet flatterer'
and 'oath-breaking and over-oath-keeping'. Alcidamas uses such
expressions as 'the soul filling with rage and face becoming
flame-flushed', and 'he thought their enthusiasm would be
issue-fraught' and 'issue-fraught he made the persuasion of his
words', and 'sombre-hued is the floor of the sea'.The way all these
words are compounded makes them, we feel, fit for verse only. This,
then, is one form in which bad taste is shown.
(2) Another is the employment of strange words. For instance,
Lycophron talks of 'the prodigious Xerxes' and 'spoliative Sciron';
Alcidamas of 'a toy for poetry' and 'the witlessness of nature', and
says 'whetted with the unmitigated temper of his spirit'.
(3) A third form is the use of long, unseasonable, or frequent
epithets. It is appropriate enough for a poet to talk of 'white milk',
in prose such epithets are sometimes lacking in appropriateness or,
when spread too thickly, plainly reveal the author turning his prose
into poetry. Of course we must use some epithets, since they lift our
style above the usual level and give it an air of distinction. But we
must aim at the due mean, or the result will be worse than if we took
no trouble at all; we shall get something actually bad instead of
something merely not good. That is why the epithets of Alcidamas seem
so tasteless; he does not use them as the seasoning of the meat, but
as the meat itself, so numerous and swollen and aggressive are they.
For instance, he does not say 'sweat', but 'the moist sweat'; not 'to
the Isthmian games', but 'to the world-concourse of the Isthmian
games'; not 'laws', but 'the laws that are monarchs of states'; not
'at a run', but 'his heart impelling him to speed of foot'; not 'a
school of the Muses', but 'Nature's school of the Muses had he
inherited'; and so 'frowning care of heart', and 'achiever' not of
'popularity' but of 'universal popularity', and 'dispenser of pleasure
to his audience', and 'he concealed it' not 'with boughs' but 'with
boughs of the forest trees', and 'he clothed' not 'his body' but 'his
body's nakedness', and 'his soul's desire was counter imitative'
(this's at one and the same time a compound and an epithet, so that it
seems a poet's effort), and 'so extravagant the excess of his
wickedness'. We thus see how the inappropriateness of such poetical
language imports absurdity and tastelessness into speeches, as well as
the obscurity that comes from all this verbosity-for when the sense is
plain, you only obscure and spoil its clearness by piling up words.
The ordinary use of compound words is where there is no term for a
thing and some compound can be easily formed, like 'pastime'
(chronotribein); but if this is much done, the prose character
disappears entirely. We now see why the language of compounds is just
the thing for writers of dithyrambs, who love sonorous noises; strange