Diving Deep into Bathos and Feeling Pity and Pathos

In my recent reading the word bathetic has come up several times. I cannot remember having seen it before, so had to look it up to see what it meant. It is not a misspelling of pathetic, although the two are related.

Bathetic and pathetic are forms of the words bathos and pathos. It will be easier to understand bathos once we have a good understanding of pathos.

Pathos is noun for the quality or power to evoke a feeling of pity or compassion. While it is often used of art, it also occurs in life. Pathetic is the adjective form, describing something that evokes pity or sympathy.

Pity is defined as sympathy or sorrow evoked by the suffering or distress of another, pitiful being the adjective form with an added definition that includes some sense of contempt or disparaging of the quality of the suffering. Pity came to English in the early 1200s from the Old French word pite, which they got from the Latin word pietatem meaning loyalty, duty or piety. (Yes, we get piety from the same word.) Old English had a word, mildheortness that meant mild-heartedness, and was, according to etymonline.com, a “loan-translation of Latin misericordia.” Etymonline also says that pity and piety were not fully distinguished from each other until the 1600s.

Pathetic is often used where pitiful is meant; it should not have a negative connotation but increasingly does. The difference between the two words is closing.

Pathos has been in use in English since the 1660s, coming over from the Greek word of the same spelling that means literally “what befalls one” according to etymonline.com. Pathos means suffering, feeling, emotion, calamity.” But the word pathetic arrived earlier, in the 1590s, from the Middle French word pathétique. Pathétique meant emotionally moving or stirring, and came from the Late Latin word patheticus, which came from the Greek word pathetikos meaning “subject to feeling, sensitive, capable of emotion.” Its root word, though had a sense of suffering that we find also in pathos. The conflation of pathetic and pitiful began in 1737.  

Bathos is pathos overdone or insincere, and anticlimax. It is trivialization or going from the sublime to the ridiculous (a phrase attributed in concept to Thomas Paine in The Age of Reason, 1793, but made popular by Napoleon, who reportedly uttered in 1812, the year he retreated from Moscow “From the sublime to the ridiculous there is only one step.”) According to britannica.com, bathos is an “unsuccessful, and therefore ludicrous, attempt to portray pathos in art, i.e., to evoke pity, sympathy, or sorrow. The term was first used in this sense by Alexander Pope in his treatise Peri Bathous; or, The Art of Sinking in Poetry (1728).” Etymonline pegs its arrival in English a year earlier, from the Greek word for depth: bathos but also attributes its introduction to Pope.

Britannica.com gives an example of bathos from the oeuvre of William Wordsworth, who tries to “arouse pity for the old huntsman in ‘Simon Lee’” with these words:

Few months of life has he in store

As he to you will tell,

For still, the more he works, the more

Do his weak ankles swell.

Sometimes the line between pathos and bathos is difficult to find. The line between pathetic and bathetic and pitiful is even more difficult to discern.

What Do Isaiah, Diana Nyad, and Oreos have to do with Satyrs and Nymphs?

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the word satire that “The word in Latin was altered because of the word satyr, when people mistakenly thought there was a connection to the Greek satyr drama, from which we get satyr.” I’ve usually pronounced it “sat–er”, but the primary pronunciation listed on Dictionary.com is “sey-ter.”

Satyrs were, in Greek mythology, gods of the woods. They are the creatures pictured as half man (usually from the waist up, attached to the body and legs of a) half horse or goat. Etymonline.com says that in pre-Roman Greek art a satyr was represented as a “man-like being with the tail and ears of a horse; the modern conception of a being part man, part goat is from Roman sculptors, who seem to have assimilated them to the fauns of native mythology.”

Their role was to serve Bacchus, the god of wine. Surely not coincidentally they were known for their riotous and lascivious behavior. As a result, a man who is known for such behavior is sometimes called a satyr. While the being has an ancient history, the word satyr was not used in English until the 1300s.

The word satyr appears twice in the King James Version of the Bible, in Isaiah 13:21 and 34:14. The key to this use of satyr is the reference to the desert in the original. Hebrew has a word for a hairy monster believed to inhabit the desert regions: se’irim. The King James Version translators decided to use the word satyr instead of “bigfoot” or “yeti.”

Unbeknownst to me until today is that there is a condition known as satyriasis, and one who has that is also known as a satyr. I call it a condition because neither webmd.com nor psychiatry.com yielded any results for a search of the word.

That doesn’t stop the dictionary from defining it, etymonline.com from telling us that by the 1650s satyriasis appeared in English, or Wikipedia from devoting a page to hypersexuality and saying that in men it is known as satyriasis and in women as nymphomania.

While nymphomania seems to be a more common word than satyriasis, it is also not an officially recognized disorder or diagnosis. While the word nymph has been used in English since the 1300s, the word nymphomania was coined in 1775 in an English translation of a dissertation by French doctor M.D.T. Bienville on women with uncontrollable sexual desire.

Nymphs were only semi-dieties. The Greek word nymphe originally referred to a young wife, then to any beautiful young woman, before eventually taking on semi-divine status. Subgroups of nymphs are dryads and hamadryads (both wood nymphs), naiads (water nymph – see Diana Nyad), nereids (sea nymphs), and oreads (mountain nymphs). Oreads have no connection to Oreos, though sometimes nymphs – in the sense of beautiful young woman - in American vernacular are called “cookies.”

So that’s how you get from satyrs and nymphs to Diana Nyad and oreos.

Some Locutions For When You Estivate

I recently ran across the word estivate, and inferred that it was the opposite of hibernate.

Estivate means “to spend the summer, as at a certain place or in a certain activity.” Hibernate means “to spend the winter.” Zoologically the meanings also includes a sense of dormancy. But if you are not talking zoologically you can use the two words to refer to those who are known as snowbirds, or even more pretentiously those who have a summer home. (e.g., “I’m wintering in Palm Springs and summering in Newport.”)

Hibernate is often used, both zoologically and non-zoologically, but estivate is not used nearly as much as it should be. Hibernate has been used for the practice of spending time in what is colloquially known as a “man-cave.” But when I spent my summers at camp (both as camper and as staff) I never knew I was estivating there.

Hibernate is likely a back-formation of the noun hibernation. Hibernate has been used since 1802, while hibernation came to English from Latin in the 1660s. Hibernationem means the same as hibernation.

Estivate, on the other hand, has been in English since the 1650s, and also came directly from Latin, from the word aestivatus that also means spend the summer.

I used the word colloquial earlier in this post, and had not covered it in a recent post, Slang, Idiom, Jargon, Euphemism, or Argot? (SIJEA) Colloquial basically means informal as opposed to formal speech. All of the forms of speech from the SIJEA post are colloquial. But not all colloquial speech fits into one of those categories.

Colloquial comes from the word colloquy, a word that dates in English from the mid-1400s. As with all our words today it comes directly from the Latin, from their word (colloquium) for conversation. Colloquy means conversation or conference. Colloquium is formed by combining the prefix com- meaning “together” with loquium that means “speaking” and from which we get the word loquacious. The form of loquium that means “to speak” is the source of English word locution. 

While I have previously covered loquacious I have not covered locution. Dictionary.com suggests that its primary definition is “a particular form of speech,” and I have heard it used that way. But I seemed to have heard the second definition more often: “a style of speech or expression; phraseology.” Perhaps because my style of speech and expression are unusual.

Another word we have from the Latin word loqui is interlocutor. It came to English in the 1510s, combining the prefix inter- (meaning between) with “to speak.” While it can refer to anyone involved in a conversation, it has developed a sense of conversational go-between, a meaning that first came from minstrel shows where a person in the middle would act as announcer and “banter with the end men,” according to Dictionary.com. It can also mean an interrogator or interviewer, although those meanings are less common.

One final loqui word today: elocution. As did colloquial, elocution came to English in the mid-1400s, from the Latin word elocutionem that means “voice production” according to etymonline.com. It also is a “’speaking out, utterance, manner of speaking,’ in classical Latin especially ‘rhetorical utterance, oratorical expression.’” 

So whether you're estivating or hibernating, you can engage in colloquy as an interlocutor. You will more likely use colloquial expressions and won't worry at all about your locution. You would also probably prefer hibernating to elocution.

Lampoon, Parody, or Satire?

Last week I mentioned that Jonathan Swift was known for his satire and parody, and then wrote those words would need to wait for another week. Well, another week has arrived, so let’s look at those words and see where they lead us.

Satire is the use of irony, sarcasm, ridicule, or the like, in exposing, denouncing, or deriding vice, folly, etc. (according to dictionary.com). Parody is a humorous or satirical imitation of a serious piece of literature or writing. I would add music and performance art to that definition, since Weird Al Yankovic and Saturday Night Live have been engaging in parodies for years.

Satire has been a word (and practice, presumably) in English since the late 1300s. It comes from the Middle French word satire which came from the Latin word satira, that means satire. It was used in Latin to refer to “a collection of poems in various meters on a variety of subjects by the late republican Roman poet Ennius.” That use related to poems about vices. The word in Latin was altered because of the word satyr, when people mistakenly thought there was a connection to the Greek satyr drama, from which we get satyr (a word for a future post).

Parody came to English in the 1590s from the Latin word parodia, which came from the Greek word paroidia, that was formed by combining para-, meaning beside, with oide, meaning a song or ode. Its first known use in English is by Ben Jonson.

Satire is defined as a written and serious form of assailing a vice or folly. Parody began (and remains) as a performance form (though it can now be a written work as well), and includes humor that is not part of the definition of satire.

Ambrose Bierce, in his “Devil’s Dictionary,” 1911, defines satire as

An obsolete kind of literary composition in which the vices and follies of the author’s enemies were expounded with imperfect tenderness. In this country satire never had more than a sickly and uncertain existence, for the soul of it is wit, wherein we are dolefully deficient, the humor that we mistake for it, like all humor, being tolerant and sympathetic. Moreover, although Americans are ‘endowed by their Creator’ with abundant vice and folly, it is not generally known that these are reprehensible qualities, wherefore the satirist is popularly regarded as a sour-spirited knave, and his every victim’s outcry for codefendants evokes a national assent.

According to Samuel Johnson, satire is differentiated from a lampoon in that satire has general reflections while lampoon is aimed at a particular person.

Lampoon is defined at dictionary.com as “a sharp, often virulent satire directed against an individual or institution.” It came to English in the 1600s from the French word lampoon, but where that word came from is unknown. French etymologists suggest it might be from lampons, that was a popular refrain in songs in the 1600s that meant “let’s drink.” It’s possible that drinking still plays a part in much lampooning that takes place these days.

So if you want to seriously address a vice or folly, particularly in writing, that is a satire. If you’re singing or writing poetry to poke fun at something, that would be a parody – particularly if it’s humorous. And if you are satirizing a particular person or a single institution, humorously or not, you are creating a lampoon. 

Political Discourse: Bunk and Baginage

As the 2014 political season comes to an end in the U.S. there are several words that come to mind: buncombe and badinage. The latter I came across while reading the letters of S.J. Perelman, the former while reading Mark Twain’s Puddinhead Wilson.

Buncombe is the more appropriate for political campaigns, especially this year when the Senate race on North Carolina could determine who controls the senate. Here’s the story behind the word:

On Feb. 25, 1820 congress was in session to decide on the statehood of Missouri. As the final committee vote was about to take place a North Carolina congressman, Felix Walker, rose to address the question. Apparently he was known for his both lengthy and boring speeches, because the House of Representatives very quickly started requesting the “question be called” and the vote taken. Walker’s response was that he wanted to get something into the record that could demonstrate to his home district that he was active and involved. His words were “I shall not be speaking to the House, but to Buncombe,” a county in North Carolina that he represented.

By 1838 bunkum became the word used generically for a representative’s home district. By 1841 it became American slang for nonsense. By 1900 the word was shortened to bunk, now an ejaculation expressing a strong feeling that the speaker is saying nonsense.

Bunkum is now defined as any insincere speech, particularly speech that is designed to impress a politician’s constituency. (Does “You can keep your doctor” come to mind?) While you can still find buncombe, particularly in writings pre-1900, it is accepted enough as a word to not need capitalization.

At the other end of political discourse is the word badinage. Badinage, as you might discern from its pronunciation (dictionary.com indicates its preferred pronunciation is with emphasis on the third syllable that it conveys as the soft g sound –ahzh) is French in origin. The French word badinage means playfulness or jesting, from the French word for joke badiner. The French word came from an Old Provençal word for yawn or gape: badar.  The Old Provençal word came from the Late Latin word of the same meaning, badare. Badinage has been used in English since the 1650s, and is a noun for jesting or teasing banter.

Banter is a noun for playful or teasing remarks, so it could be synonymous with badinage. Banter came into use in English in the 1670s as a verb, and by the 1680s was also used as a noun. According to Jonathan Swift it came from London street slang. 

And just to complete the circle, if you were not aware, Jonathan Swift, renowned for his satire and parody (words for another week) Gulliver’s Travels, was also a political pamphleteer for both the Whigs and the Tories. Some thought he engaged in buncombe, although the term was not to be coined during Swift’s lifetime.