Bathos
An abrupt, often unintentional descent from the elevated to the trivial — the opposite of pathos.
Bathos (Greek, 'depth') is the rhetorical fall from lofty language into the banal. The word was popularised by Alexander Pope's mock-treatise Peri Bathous (1727), a parody of the ancient On the Sublime, in which Pope catalogued the ways bad poets accidentally sink from grandeur to absurdity. In modern usage bathos names both the unintended failure and the deliberate comic device.
The typical bathetic effect involves a build-up of elevated diction, imagery, or sentiment, followed by a sudden drop to something ordinary or absurd. Byron: 'and thou, all-shaking thunder … dread rattling thunder … / Take my milk for gall.' The descent from thunder to milk is the joke. In stand-up comedy, this is often called the 'pull-back-and-reveal': three grand things and then a mundane one.
Bathos differs from pathos, which is the appeal to genuine emotion. It differs from anticlimax, which is a broader term for any letdown. Bathos specifically requires the register shift — high style deflated by low content, or vice versa.
Unintentional bathos is the most common failure mode of ambitious writing. When editing a solemn passage, read the final line aloud: if it accidentally makes you smile, you have written a bathos. The remedy is either to raise the last line to the level of what precedes it, or to embrace the drop and make the joke on purpose.
“For thee I dine, for thee I fast, / For thee I fight, for thee I sing, / For thee I have to catch the bus.”
Keep reading the glossary
Deliberate exaggeration for effect — not meant to be taken literally.
A gap between what is said and what is meant — or between expectation and outcome.
A figure of speech that deliberately says less than the situation warrants, for emphasis, irony, or dry humour.
An understatement that affirms by denying its opposite — 'not bad' meaning 'good'.