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When English speakers turned apathy into apathetic in the late 17th century, using the suffix -etic to turn the noun into the adjective, they were inspired by pathetic, the adjectival form of pathos, from Greek pathētikos. People also applied that bit of linguistic transformation to coin bathetic. English speakers added the suffix -etic to bathos, the Greek word for "depth," which in English has come to mean "triteness" or "excessive sentimentalism." The result: the ideal adjective for the incredibly commonplace or the overly sentimental.
Examples of bathetic in a Sentence
New York Times, 29 Sep. 2021
For a globe-tracking narrative, some of the scenes which stand out in Episode 1 are the bathetic vignettes of Havelange’s domestic life, as his wife bears the brunt of an absent husband….
—John Hopewell, Variety, 14 Oct. 2022
This navel-gazing can seem bathetic and indulgent, and certainly not always honest.
—Rachel Syme, The New Yorker, 13 Sep. 2022
The disorienting sentences, the deceptively plain declarations of fact, the perpetual sense of a great unraveling, the bathetic juxtapositions of social nonsense and bottomless anxiety—all are perfectly calibrated to our age of ecological dread.
—Nathaniel Rich, The New York Review of Books, 7 Oct. 2021
Characters meet brutal, untimely, bathetic deaths, which may or may not slow them down.
—Katy Waldman, The New Yorker, 20 Sep. 2021
Although an ugly personal wrangle forms the bathetic close of their joint story, Conan Doyle’s integrity shines through.
—Alexandra Mullen, WSJ, 26 July 2018
Timothée Chamalet and Armie Hammer are superb in the central roles, and despite an unignorable bathetic turn in the supporting performances, this is an important film.
—Chronicle Staff Report, San Francisco Chronicle, 5 Apr. 2018
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Cite this Entry
“Bathetic.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bathetic. Accessed 21 Dec. 2024.
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