BATHOS

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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.

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