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(N. Y. T. Magazine, 19 Oct., 1958.)
"Personally I detest her (Gioconda's) smug, mystery-making,
come-hither-but-go-away-again-because-butter-wouldn't-melt-in-my-
mouth expression." (New Statesman and Nation, Jan. 5, 1957)
"There is a sort of lOh-what-a-wicked-world-this-is-and-how-
I-wish-I-could-do-something-to-make-it-better-and-nobler' expression
about Montmorency that has been known to bring the tears into
the eyes of pious old ladies and gentlemen." (Jerome K. Jerome,
"Three Men in a Boat")
"Freddie was standing in front of the fireplace with a lwell-that's-
the-story-what-are-we-going-to-do-about-it' air that made him a focal
point." (Leslie Ford, "Siren in the Night")
An interesting structural detail of phrase and sentence epithets is
that they are generally followed by the words expression, air, attitude and
others which describe behaviour or facial expression. In other words,
such epithets seem to transcribe into language symbols a communication
usually conveyed by non-linguistic means.
Another structural feature of such phrase epithets is that after the
nouns they refer to, there often comes a subordinate attributive clause
beginning with that. This attributive clause, as it were, serves the pur-
pose of decoding the effect of the communication. It must be noted that
phrase epithets are always hyphenated, thus pointing to the temporary
structure of the compound word.
These two structural features have predetermined the functioning
of phrase epithets. Practically any phrase or sentence which deals with
the psychological state of a person may serve as an epithet. The phrases
and sentences transformed into epithets lose their independence and as-
sume a new quality which is revealed both in the intonation pattern
(that of an attribute) and graphically (by being hyphenated).
Another structural variety of the epithet is the one which we shall
term reversed. The reversed epithet is composed of two nouns linked
in an of-phrase. The subjective, evaluating, emotional element is embod-
ied not in the noun attribute but in the noun structurally described, for
example: "the shaaow of a smile"; "a devil of a job" (Maugham); "...he
smiled brightly, neatly, efficiently, a military abbreviation of a smile"
(Graham Green); "A devil of a sea rolls in that bay" (Byron); "A little
Flying Dutchman of a cab" (Galsworthy); "...a dog of a fellow" (Dickens);
"her brute of a brother" (Galsworthy); "...a long nightshirt of a mackin-
tosh..." (Cronin)
It will be observed that such epithets arе metaphorical. The noun
to be assessed is contained in the of-phrase and the noun it qualifies is a
metaphor (shadow, devil, military abbreviation, Flying Dutchman, dog).
The grammatical aspect, viz. attributive relation between the members
of the combination shows that the SD here is an epithet.
It has been acknowledged that it is sometimes difficult to draw a line
of demarcation between attributive and predicative relations. Some at- tributes carry so much information that they may justly be considered
bearers of predicativeness. This is particularly true of the epithet, espec-
ially genuine or speech epithets, which belong to language-in-action
and not to language-as-a-system. These epithets are predicative in es-
sence, though not in form.
On the other hand, some word-combinations where we have predic-
ative relations convey so strongly the emotional assessment of the
object spoken of, that in spite of their formal, structural design, the
predicatives can be classed as epithets. Here are some examples:
'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 border-line
variety of epithet.
Some language epithets, in spite of opposition on the part of ortho-
dox language purists, establish themselves in standard English as con-
ventional symbols of assessment for a given period. To these belong words
we have already spoken of like terrible, awful, massive, top, dramatic,
mighty, crucial (see p. 66). 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. 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)
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