bathos

Noun

bathos (usually uncountable, plural bathoses)

1. (usually) Overdone or treacly attempts to inspire pathos.
   • I like you more than I can say; but I'll not sink into a bathos of sentiment...1847, Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre, page 192

   Synonyms:

   narm, sappiness, cheesiness, tweeness, treacliness

2. (usually) A risible failure on the part of a work of art to properly affect its audience, particularly owing to
   • While a plain and direct Road is pav'd to their ὐψος, or sublime; no Track has been yet chalk'd out to arrive at our βάθος, or profund.1727, Alexander Pope, Peri Bathous
3. (usually) An anticlimax: an abrupt transition in style or subject from high to low.

   Synonyms:

   anticlimax

4. (usually) A banality: an unaffectingly clichéd or trite treatment of a topic.
5. (usually) Immaturity: a lack of serious treatment of a topic.
6. (usually) A hyperbole: excessiveness.
7. (usually) The ironic use of such failure for satiric or humorous effect.
8. (uncommon, usually) A nadir, a low point particularly in one's career.
   • How meanly has he closed his inflated career! What a sample of the bathos will his history present!1814, Thomas Jefferson, Writings, IV.240
   • I know what he suffers now, for instance, exactly: it is merely a beginning of what he shall suffer, though. And he’ll never be able to emerge from his bathos of coarseness and ignorance.1847, Emily Brontë, chapter XXI, in Wuthering Heights