Time magazine has unlocked its archives on its revamped Web site, and I’m giddy with excitement. Now, free of charge, I can revel in Time’s nine-decade celebration of the Homeric epithet. As quickly as I can move my fingers on the keyboard, I can find out whom Time has called “snaggle-toothed” (author and cultural arbiter Tom Wolfe, among others, I was surprised to discover).

Teeth, in fact, have been the inspiration for many of Time’s hyphenated epithets. Joe DiMaggio was “squirrel-toothed” in 1947, then, inexplicably, he was “beaver-toothed” a year later. One of my favorites is from a 1938 issue, which told of a “gat-toothed spinstress” who, at the age of seventy, was marrying a twenty-two-year-old man. Initially I wondered if “gat” was a misprint of “gap,” but a trip to the dictionary suggests Time knew what it was implying. Derived from “goat,” the word can mean lustful or wanton.

Early Time-style, compressed and hyphen-happy (and still enlivening the magazine’s pages), was the invention of Briton Hadden, who cofounded Time with Henry Luce, his Hotchkiss and Yale classmate. According to Isaiah Wilner, a recent Hadden biographer, Hadden read Homer in the original Greek and kept a copy of The Iliad (with its “wine-dark sea”) on his desk as he edited every word that went into the magazine. As editor-in-chief, he often penciled new epithets into copy, letting out a whoop when the right words could be joined by a hyphen.

Eyes have provided Time with more inspiration than perhaps any other part of the body. Sometimes the magazine resorts to a hackneyed “bleary-eyed,” “steely-eyed,” or “hawk-eyed,” but it also produces gems—like “bedroom-eyed ballet dancer and international superhunk Mikhail Baryshnikov,” in 2003, and the dead-on “raccoon-eyed” for J. Edgar Hoover, from 2004. Occasionally, Time has a foot fetish. Actress Mae...

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