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. .
. Every noun is either "ordinary"1 or "rare" or "metaphorical" or "ornamental" or
"invented" or "lengthened" or "curtailed" or "altered." An "ordinary" word is one used by everybody, a "rare" word
one used by some; so that a word may
obviously be both "ordinary" and "rare," but not in relation to the same people.
σίγυνον,2 for instance, is to the Cypriots an "ordinary" word
but to us a "rare" one. Metaphor is the application of a strange term either
transferred from the genus and applied to the species or from the species and
applied to the genus, or from one species to another or else by analogy. An example of a term transferred from genus
to species is "Here stands my ship." Riding at anchor is a species of standing.
An example of transference from
species to genus is "Indeed ten thousand noble things Odysseus did," for ten
thousand, which is a species of many, is here used instead of the word "many."
An example of transference from
one species to another is "Drawing off his life with the bronze" and "Severing with
the tireless bronze," where "drawing off" is used for "severing" and "severing" for
"drawing off," both being species of "removing."3 Metaphor by analogy
means this: when B is to A as D is to C, then instead of B the poet will say D and B
instead of D. And sometimes they add
that to which the term supplanted by the metaphor is relative.4
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For instance, a cup
is to Dionysus what a shield is to Ares; so he will call the cup "Dionysus's shield" and the shield
"Ares' cup." Or old age is to life as evening is to day; so he will call the evening
"day's old-age" or use Empedocles' phrase5; and old age he will call "the evening of life" or "life's setting
sun." Sometimes there is no word for
some of the terms of the analogy but the metaphor can be used all the same. For
instance, to scatter seed is to sow, but there is no word for the action of the sun
in scattering its fire. Yet this has to the sunshine the same relation as sowing has
to the seed, and so you have the phrase "sowing the god-created fire." Besides this
another way of employing metaphor is to call a thing by the strange name and then to
deny it some attribute of that name. For instance, suppose you call the shield not
"Ares' cup" but a “wineless cup.” . . .6 . . . An invented
word is one not used at all by any people and coined by the poet. There seem to be
such words, eg. "sprouters" for horns and "pray-er" for priest. A word is
"lengthened" or "curtailed,"
1 i.e., one which has dined normal currency as contrasted with the "rare word," which is confined to a dialect or borrowed from a foreign language.
2 Meaning, "spear."
3 Probably "the bronze" is in the first case a knife and in the second a cupping-bowl. This would make the metaphor intelligible.
4 This may claim to be one of Aristotle's least lucid sentences. It means this: If Old Age: Life:: Evening: Day, then we may call old age " the Evening of Life." In that case "old age" is the "term supplanted by the metaphor," and it is relative to " Life"; therefore "Life" （i.e., "that to which the term supplanted by the metaphor is relative"）is added to the metaphorical （or "transferred"） term "Evening."
5 Unknown to us.
6 Or you might call Love "Venus's bloodless War." At this point a few lines on "Ornament" have evidently been lost, since this is its place in the catalogue of nouns above. By "ornament" he seems to mean an embellishing epithet or synonym. In the Rhetoric he quotes "Our lady the fig-tree" as a misplaced "ornament." One might add the seventeenth-century use of "Thames" for "water."
Aristotle. Aristotle in 23 Volumes, Vol. 23, translated by W.H. Fyfe. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1932.
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