BATHOS
Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language
|
1998
|
|
© Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language 1998, originally published by Oxford University Press 1998. (Hide copyright information)
Copyright
BATHOS. A term in
RHETORIC for a ludicrous
ANTICLIMAX: ‘For God, for country, and for Acme Gasworks’ (
Random House Dictionary, 1987). Satire is often deliberately bathetic; in Swift's
Gulliver's Travels (1726), the real-life disputes of Protestants and Catholics are presented as a Lilliputian war in which Big-Endians and Little-Endians fight over where to open a boiled egg.
Cite this article
Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography.
|
Bathos
Book article from: The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature
Bathos (Greek, ‘depth’). The current usage for ‘descent from the sublime to the ridiculous’ originates from Pope's satire Peri Bathous, or The Art of Sinking in Poetry (1727). The title was a travesty of Longinus' essay On the Sublime .
Read more
|
|
bathos
Book article from: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology
bathos XVIII. — Gr. báthos depth, f. bathús deep. Hence bathetic XIX; after pathos , pathetic .
Read more
|
|
isobath
Book article from: The Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea
isobath, from the Greek iso , equal, and bathos , depth, a line on a chart linking points of equal depth, sometimes called a depth contour.
Read more
|
|
Manilow, Barry
Dictionary entry from: Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Popular Musicians Since 1990
...Manilow surged to a brief spell of super-stardom in the 1970s, commanding a large audience enthralled by his slickly packaged bathos. Alternately lionized as an earnest songwriter and derided as a purveyor of soft rock melodrama, Manilow ebbed from his peak...
Read more
|
|
ANTICLIMAX
Book article from: Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language
...realms obey, / Dost sometimes counsel take—and sometimes Tea’ (Pope, The Rape of the Lock , 1712). 2. In drama, the lowered state after a CLIMAX ; in life, an outcome that fails to live up to expectation. See BATHOS , FIGURE OF SPEECH .
Read more
|
