12
And sometimes they add that to which the term supplanted by the metaphor is relative.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.For instance, a cup is to Dionysus what a shield is to Ares;
13
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’ phraseUnknown to us.; and old age he will call the evening of life or life’s setting sun.
14
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.
15
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.” . . .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.
17
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.
