Popular Antonomasia

• Tarzan - wild

• Solomon - a wise man

• Casanova - a philanderer

• The Bard of Avon - William Shakespeare

• Beowulf - a myth

• The Führer - Adolf Hitler

• Judas - Betrayer

• The Philosopher - Aristotle

• Cicero - orator

• Gandhi - non-violence

• Silicon Valley - where all the geeks go, high-tech hub

• Beckham - footballer

• The Iron Lady - Margaret Thatcher

• The King of Pop - Michael Jackson

• An Einstein - an intelligent person

• Macedonia's Madman - Alexander the Great

• Rembrandt - an artist.

Epithet is a word or phrase, which expresses some quality of a person, thing, idea or phenomenon. It serves to emphasize a certain property or feature. Epithet is of special significance in different kinds of poetry. Each epoch and each genre has its own stock of traditional epithets. Sometimes they are called fixed: “green wood”, “merry men”, “true love”, “yellow hair”. The choice of epithets is one of the primary characteristics of a poet’s style:

“The flowing Spring leads Sunny Summer,

And yellow Autumn presses near,

Then in its turn comes gloomy Winter

Till smiling Spring appears.” (R.Burns).

Epithet expresses a characteristic of an object, both existing and imaginary. Its basic feature is its emotiveness and subjectivity, that is the characteristic, which is attached to the object in order to qualify it. The speaker himself always chooses it. In epithet, the emotive meaning of the word is foregrounded to suppress its denotational meaning.

Epithet has remained through centuries the most widely used SD. It offers ample opportunities of qualifying every object from the author’s partial and subjective viewpoint. The structure and semantics of epithets are extremely variable. This is explained by their long and wide use.

Semantically we differentiate two main groups: affective (or emotive proper) - this is the biggest group - and figurative (or transferred). Emotive epithets serve to convey the emotional evaluation of the object by the speaker. Most of the qualifying words can be used as affective epithets (“gorgeous”, “nasty”, “magnificent”, atrocious”).

Figurative epithets are metaphors, metonymies and similes which are expressed by adjectives:”the smiling sun”, “the frowning cloud”, “the sleepless pillow”, “a ghost-like face”, “a dreamlike experience”. These epithets are based on similarity of characteristics of two objects, or nearness of the qualified objects, or their comparison.

In the overwhelming majority of examples epithet is expressed by adjectives, or qualitative adverbs: “his triumphant look” = “he looked triumphantly”. Nouns are used in exclamatory sentences or as post-positive attributes: “You, ostrich!”; “Richard of the Lion Heart”.

Epithets are used singly, in pairs, in chains, in two-step structures, in inverted constructions, as phrase-attributes.

Pairs are represented by two epithets joined by a conjunction or asyndetically:”wonderful and incomparable beauty”.

Chains (strings) of epithets present a group of homogeneous attributes which vary in number from three up to sometimes twenty and even more: “You are scolding, unjust, abusive, aggravating, bad old creature”.

Epithets are called two-step epithets because the process of qualifying seemingly passes two stages - the qualification of the object and the qualification of the qualification itself: “an unnaturally mild day”, “a pompously majestic female”. They have a fixed structure of “adverb + adjective” model.

Phrase epithets produce an original impression: “the sunshine-in-the-breakfast-room-smell”; “a move-if-you-dare-expression”; “the man-I-saw-yesterday-son”. A semantically self-sufficient word combination or even a whole sentence is turned into a phrase epithet.