tragicize

present singular third person tragicizes · participle present tragicizing · participle past tragicized · past tragicized

1. obsoleterareTo speak or write in the manner of a tragedy; to adopt a grandiloquent style.

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   How shall I omit those ungardenlike gardens, void of pot-herbs? or the Augean store, which we cleared out and spread over them; what time we worked the hillside plough, vine-planter I, and awful you, with this neck and hands, which still bear the marks of the toil (O earth and sun, air and virtue! for I will tragicize a bit), not the Hellespont to yoke, but to level the steep.

   1840, John Henry Newman, The Church of the Fathers, section VIII

2. rareTo turn (someone or something) into tragedy; to make tragic.

   Fired and, in effect, executed too, Phillip Loeb had to be tragicized, like the Rosenbergs […].

   2009, Joseph Litvak, The Un-Americans: Jews, the Blacklist, and Stoolpigeon Culture, page 156

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   I like to be tragic, I like to be funny / For in less than a century / Comic will have been tragicized / Tragedy comicalized.

   1972, Mohan Singh Uberoi, I Believe, page 19