bathos.
Overdone or treacly attempts to inspire pathos.
Meaning & usage
Overdone or treacly attempts to inspire pathos.
A risible failure on the part of a work of art to properly affect its audience, particularly owing to
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.
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.
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.
A risible failure on the part of a work of art to properly affect its audience, particularly owing to: A hyperbole: excessiveness.
The ironic use of such failure for satiric or humorous effect.
A nadir, a low point particularly in one's career.
Where this word comes from
Borrowed from Ancient Greek βάθος (báthos, “depth”). Employed ironically following Alexander Pope's Peri Bathous, lampooning various errors in contemporary writers.
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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.
Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.