epithetry

English

Etymology

epithet +‎ -ry

Noun

epithetry (uncountable)

1. (rare) The art or practice of using epithets.
   • 1919 August, George Gilbert, “The Mottled Slayer”, in Sunset, the Pacific Monthly, volume 43, number 2, →OCLC, page 20:

     Chang Loi’s ancestry with choice bits of elephant-folk epithetry so tangful they made even Barnsdale’s accustomed ears to pringle with their novelty and warmth.

   • 1956, Eric Sevareid, Small Sounds in the Night: a Collection of Capsule Commentaries on the American Scene, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, →OCLC, page 39:

     Political epithetry of course is quite different from gobbledygook or bafflegab, which means bureaucratic lingo; we are keeping our pulse on bafflegab, too, but have time here only to report one new addition: 'quid pro quid.

   • 1969, Walter Kerr, “Film, Stage, Novel”, in Thirty Plays Hath November: Pain and Pleasure in the Contemporary Theater, New York: Simon and Schuster, →ISBN, page 100:

     But the theater can still inch toward total outcry: the stir of imagery inside the prose of Tennessee Williams, the crackle of wit that polarizes our attention in A Man for All Seasons (mote riveting on the stage because of our undeflected concentration on a mind), the undisguised rhetoric of Shaw and the onrushing epithetry of Albee and Osborne at their best all intimate the compulsion we have toward speech that sears, and, in the searing, seals.