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undyingking#4 in an occasional series -- your challenge is to use it at least once today.
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.)
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.)
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The results suggest that Bathos is about talking in heroic, epic style about elevated things, only to jarringly and without pause or warning move to talking about things that are banal. Which doesn't seem to match what you say above! I know googling is no way to learn English, but...
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Date: 2005-09-12 03:45 pm (UTC)Very true, but then nor is LiveJournal, especially not mine... The Bush line is the closest example to that usage, but I was trying really to say that there are lots of different ways of generating bathos these days.
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Date: 2005-09-16 09:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-16 09:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-17 12:00 pm (UTC)