Words & WritingGreek → English
Bathos
/ˈbeɪθɒs/noun
An unintended drop from the elevated to the trivial in speech or writing.
The Greek roots
βάθος
báthos
depth
Literally: “depth”
Follow a root:βάθος2 words
The story of the word
Pope invented the literary sense in 1728 with Peri Bathous, or the Art of Sinking in Poetry, a mock handbook shadowing the ancient treatise Περὶ Ὕψους, On the Sublime. Where hypsos was height, bathos was depth, and the joke was a manual teaching poets to descend on purpose what they were already doing by accident. It gets confused with pathos constantly, though the two share nothing but a rhyme.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → English
- First recorded
- 1728
Same family
bathymetrybathyspherebatholith
In a sentence
The eulogy ended in bathos when he thanked the caterers.
One line of bathos can sink a whole page of good writing.