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