Things I've been up to lately

Nothing too desperately exciting, but this is no bad thing.

( House viewing )

( London pubbing )

( Garden clearing )

( Cricket watching )

Mo's Rather Interesting World of Figures of Speech and Other Rhetorical Devices

#4 in an occasional series -- your challenge is to use it at least once today.

Bathos

Literally, "depth".

Not a term from classical rhetoric, but coined by Alexander Pope for his mock-epics, in contrast to pathos. His idea was that while pathos egages our emotions with the hero, bathos can be used to distance us from him and make him absurd, by using a heroic, epic style to discuss trivial activities, to the implied ridicule of those involved.

Pope observed that many authors do this unintentionally, and this is the more common meaning now --  anticlimax -- undercutting a serious point by means of triteness, risibility, spurious pathos or anything else really. An example of a modern-style satirical use from the current Onion: "Bush: 'It Has Been Brought To My Attention That There Was Recently A Bad Storm'". An example of the older Pope-style satirical use might be this one, in which the serious conventions of a movie review are used to ridicule the shallowness of this genre.

Nowadays I guess it's probably used as much for comic plonking effect as for satire. Like Jimmy Carr's joke: "My dad's dying wish was to have his family around him. I can't help thinking he would have been better off
with more oxygen."

(In case you missed it, here's a link to the last MRIWFSORD, on syllepsis, which I foolishly posted at the weekend when no-one was looking.)