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Fools that they are'; 'Wicked as he is.' The inverted position of the predicatives 'fools' and 'wicked' as well as the intensifying 'that they are' and 'as he is' mark this borderline variety of epithet.
Some language epithets, in spite of opposition on the part of orthodox language purists, establish themselves in standard English as conventional symbols of assessment for a given period. To these belong words we have already spoken of like terrible, awful, massive, top, mighty, crucial (See p. 93).
From the point of view of the distribution of the epithets in the sentence, the first model to be pointed out is the string of epithets. Here area few examples. In his depiction of New York, O. Henry gives the following string of epithets:
"Such was the background of the wonderful ,cruel, enchanting, bewildering, fatal, great city;"
Other examples are: a plump, rosy-cheeked, wholesome apple-faced young woman (Dickens); "a well-matched, fairly-balanced give-and-take couple." (Dickens)
As in any enumeration the string of epithets gives a many-sided
Diction of the object. But in this many-sidedness there is always a suggestion of an ascending order of emotive elements. This can easily be observed in the intonation pattern of a string of epithets. There is generally an ascending scale which culminates in the last epithet; if the last epithet is a language epithet (great), or not an epithet (young), the culminating point is the last genuine epithet. The culminating point in the above examples is at fatal, apple-faced, and give-and-take.
Another distributional model is the transferred epithet. Transferred epithets are ordinary logical attributes generally describing the state of a human being, but made to refer to an inanimate object, for example: sick chamber, sleepless pillow, restless pace, breathless eagerness, unbreakfasted morning, merry hours, a disapproving finger, Isabel shrugged an indifferent shoulder.
As may be seen, it is the force contributed to the attribute by its position, and not by its meaning, that hallows it into an epithet. The main feature of the epithet, that of emotional assessment, is greatly diminished in this model; but it never quite vanishes. The meaning of the logical attributes in such combinations acquires a definite emotional colouring.
. Language epithets as part of the emotional word stock of the language have a tendency to become obsolescent. That is the fate of many emotional elements in the language. They gradually lose their emotive charge and are replaced by new ones which in their turn will be replaced by neologisms. Such was the fate of the language epithet good-natured. In the works of Henry Fielding this epithet appears very often, as for example, 'a good-natured hole', 'good-natured side'. The words vast and vastly were also used as epithets in the works of men-of-letters of the 18th century, as in vast rains, vastly amused.
The problem of the epithet is too large and too significant to be fully dealt with in a short chapter. Indeed, it may be regarded as the crucial problem in emotive language and correspondingly among the stylistic devices of the language.
It remains only to say that the epithet is a direct and straightforward way of showing the author's attitude towards the things described, whereas other stylistic devices, even image-bearing ones, will reveal the author's evaluation of the object only indirectly. That is probably why those authors who wish to show a seeming impartiality and objectivity in depicting their heroes and describing events use few epithets. Realistic authors use epithets much more sparingly, as statistical data have shown. Roughly speaking, Romanticism on the other hand may to some extent be characterized by its abundant use of epithets. In illustration we have taken at random a few lines from a stanza in Byron's "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage":
The horrid crags, by toppling convent, crowned.
The cork-trees hoar that clothe the shaggy steep,
The mountain-moss by scorching skies imbrown'd.
The sunken glen, whose sunless shrubs must weep
The orange tints that gild the greenest bough...
Oxymoron
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