bathos — English Dictionary

Noun

1. Overdone or treacly attempts to inspire pathos.

   Usage

   • Uncountable
   • usually

   Examples

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

2. A risible failure on the part of a work of art to properly affect its audience, particularly owing to

   Usage

   • Uncountable
   • usually

   Examples

   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.

3. A risible failure on the part of a work of art to properly affect its audience, particularly owing to: An anticlimax: an abrupt transition in style or subject from high to low.

   Usage

   • Uncountable
   • usually

4. A risible failure on the part of a work of art to properly affect its audience, particularly owing to: A banality: an unaffectingly clichéd or trite treatment of a topic.

   Usage

   • Uncountable
   • usually

5. A risible failure on the part of a work of art to properly affect its audience, particularly owing to: Immaturity: a lack of serious treatment of a topic.

   Usage

   • Uncountable
   • usually

6. A risible failure on the part of a work of art to properly affect its audience, particularly owing to: A hyperbole: excessiveness.

   Usage

   • Uncountable
   • usually

7. The ironic use of such failure for satiric or humorous effect.

   Usage

   • Uncountable
   • usually

8. A nadir, a low point particularly in one's career.

   Usage

   • Uncommon
   • Uncountable
   • usually

   Examples

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

   More examples (2)

   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.

Noun

1. triteness or triviality of style

   Broader terms

   expressive stylestyle

2. insincere pathos

   Synonyms

   mawkishness

   Broader terms

   sentimentality

3. a change from a serious subject to a disappointing one

   Synonyms

   anticlimax

   Broader terms

   conclusionendcloseclosingending