bathetic

• “The synonymy of such lovesick sappiness: mawkish is unpleasantly insipid; maudlin is teary (an alteration of the weeping penitent Mary Magdalene); gushy is prone to pour out torrents of flattery; schmaltzy is cornball; gooey implies a substance or emotion both sticky and slithery; squishy-soft is moistly weak; bathetic, from the Greek bathos (“depth”), coined on the analogy of pathos to pathetic, connotes both triteness and insincerity.”

  Simon & Schuster: The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time

• “I used 'bathetic' in an e-mail to council colleagues - one of them told me my spellchecker was faulty.”

  A tad irritating

• “It's not quite as able and seemingly effortless as some of Lovecraft's later work would usually be although anyone who finds this story "dry and long-winded" with a "bathetic" ending, as Joshi claims to, shouldn't be as fond of "Shadow Out of Time" as Joshi claims he is, but it's much, much better than the critical consensus seems to have it.”

  Kenneth Hite's Journal

• “Dickens's readers really wanted to feel the kind of bathetic sadness that he tried to evoke.”

  SharperIron

• “This bathetic tale of soul-searching brought to mind the excitable British darts commentator Sid Waddell, who once said of the precocious world champion, Eric Bristow: When Alexander the Great was 33 he cried salt tears because there were no more worlds to conquer.”

  The Wall Street Journal: Boardroom Conquerors

• “As crises go, the Clinton-Lewinsky imbroglio is now an absurdist, bathetic footnote to what was in fact significant about that era: the evolution of finance in a culture of deregulation and the evolution of jihadism against the United States.”

  Forbes: Time For A Slow-Word Movement

• “Sing It Loud" is an inspirational tune about being true to yourself, the sort of bathetic theme that can sink an artist into cliches and obvious moves like a rousing chorus.”

  The Huffington Post: Michael Giltz: CD Of The Week: kd lang Is Back! (Did She Ever Leave?)

• “She wasn't an ingenue a year later when she posed naked under a bedsheet, opposite the Palace of Westminster, in an extraordinary image: the glamour of Parliament made bathetic by the way Bercow's leg poked provocatively out between a beige armchair and the curtains.”

  The Guardian: A three-line whip and Mr Speaker | Victoria Coren

• “The result is that Antony's extreme grief at the fake news of her supposed suicide, instead of being a dramatically ironic expression of tragic and ennobling love is so ridiculously bathetic (especially when contrasted with his raw cry of pain on hearing of the death of his friend Enobarbus) that the press-night audience laughed.”

  The Guardian: Antony and Cleopatra – review

• “Planets and people have comical names and bizarre characteristics; and threats to the universe are both gruesome and bathetic.”

  October Books 19) Doctor Who - Slipback

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