'These are now part of the oral tradition of the year 2016'

Anna North in the Taking Note blog at The New York Times,

"Mr. Trump’s nicknames are very consistent — these days, he rarely tweets Hillary Clinton’s name without 'crooked' in front of it. In this, they recall a rhetorical device from an earlier era: the Homeric epithet.

"Every character in the 'Iliad' and the 'Odyssey' has an epithet, or a 'a distinctive adjective that sums up that character, explained Bruce Louden, a professor of languages and linguistics at the University of Texas at El Paso who specializes in Homer’s epics."

(via James Taranto)