Meaning of Bathos | Babel Free

Definitions

1. Overdone or treacly attempts to inspire pathos.
   uncountable, usually
2. A risible failure on the part of a work of art to properly affect its audience, particularly owing to
   uncountable, usually
3. A risible failure on the part of a work of art to properly affect its audience, particularly owing to:
   uncountable, usually
4. An anticlimax: an abrupt transition in style or subject from high to low.
   uncountable, usually
5. A banality: an unaffectingly clichéd or trite treatment of a topic.
   uncountable, usually
6. Immaturity: a lack of serious treatment of a topic.
   uncountable, usually
7. A hyperbole: excessiveness.
   uncountable, usually
8. The ironic use of such failure for satiric or humorous effect.
   uncountable, usually
9. A nadir, a low point particularly in one's career.
   uncommon, uncountable, usually

Equivalents

Examples

“I like⟳ you more than I can say⟳; but I'll not sink⟳ into a bathos of sentiment...”

“While a plain and direct⟳ Road is pav'd to their ὐψος, or sublime; no Track has been yet chalk'd out to arrive⟳ at our βάθος, or profund.”

“How meanly has he closed his inflated career! What a sample of the bathos will his history present⟳!”

“I know⟳ what he suffers now, for instance, exactly: it is merely a beginning of what he shall suffer⟳, though. And he’ll never be able to emerge⟳ from his bathos of coarseness and ignorance.”

“Thus can the ideology of the fringe, the pinstripe mutterings of the nativist few, end⟳ up determining the trajectory of an entire nation. This is where bathos meets tragedy.”

CEFR level