bathos

plural bathoses

1. uncountableusuallyOverdone 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. uncountableusuallyartA 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. A risible failure on the part of a work of art to properly affect its audience, particularly owing to:
   1. uncountableusuallyartAn anticlimax: an abrupt transition in style or subject from high to low.

      Synonyms: anticlimax

   2. uncountableusuallyartA banality: an unaffectingly clichéd or trite treatment of a topic.
   3. uncountableusuallyartImmaturity: a lack of serious treatment of a topic.
   4. uncountableusuallyartA hyperbole: excessiveness.
4. uncountableusuallyartThe ironic use of such failure for satiric or humorous effect.
5. uncommonuncountableusuallyA 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

   2 more examples

   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

   Thus can the ideology of the fringe, the pinstripe mutterings of the nativist few, end up determining the trajectory of an entire nation. This is where bathos meets tragedy.

   2018, Matthew d'Ancona, “The Tories are a party in crisis, their identity in desperate shape”, in Guardian