“There is a rocky wart upon the mountain's brow.”1The opposite fault, which is no less serious, consists [p. 239] in calling small things by extravagant names, though such a practice is permissible when deliberately designed to raise a laugh. Consequently we must not call a parricide a scamp, nor a man who keeps a harlot a villain, since the first epithet is too weak and the second too strong.
[48]
Next to indecency of expression comes meanness,
styled ταπείνωσις, when the grandeur or dignity of
anything is diminished by the words used, as in the
line:
1 From an unknown tragedian.
Quintilian. With An English Translation. Harold Edgeworth Butler. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1922.
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