The Complete Aristotle (eng.)

so that the kinship is clearly
perceived as soon as the words are said. Thus in the celebrated
riddle
I marked how a man glued bronze with fire to another man’s
body,
    the process is nameless; but both it and gluing are a kind of
application, and that is why the application of the cupping-glass
is here called a ‘gluing’. Good riddles do, in general, provide us
with satisfactory metaphors: for metaphors imply riddles, and
therefore a good riddle can furnish a good metaphor. Further, the
materials of metaphors must be beautiful; and the beauty, like the
ugliness, of all words may, as Licymnius says, lie in their sound
or in their meaning. Further, there is a third consideration-one
that upsets the fallacious argument of the sophist Bryson, that
there is no such thing as foul language, because in whatever words
you put a given thing your meaning is the same. This is untrue. One
term may describe a thing more truly than another, may be more like
it, and set it more intimately before our eyes. Besides, two
different words will represent a thing in two different lights; so
on this ground also one term must be held fairer or fouler than
another. For both of two terms will indicate what is fair, or what
is foul, but not simply their fairness or their foulness, or if so,
at any rate not in an equal degree. The materials of metaphor must
be beautiful to the ear, to the understanding, to the 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.
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