Human-verified examples from authoritative sources
Exact Expressions
60 human-written examples
That has resulted in the bathetic spectacle of the once-omnipotent PRI asking its supporters for a peso a day to help it pay the fine.
I HELD fire on Barack Obama's bathetic speech from the Oval Office.
His parallel send-up of television news coverage, including the bathetic voyeurism surrounding the death of John F. Kennedy, Jr. in 1999, is more chidingly adjectival than properly parodic: "The self-seriousness of the commentator was perfectly matched to the speciousness of his principal assertion".
In one respect these demigods have everything we all want – money, power, sex, success – but in another they can be infantile creatures full of pathos: enormous eggshell egos caught between creative heights and bathetic lows.
Hugely involving as the film is, it rather deflates (like the blow-up doll that Vera resembles) as it heads towards a bathetic final scene.
Hollywood rarely dreams so big.***** Thursday The Tree of Life 1.15pm & 7.30pm Sky Movies Indie (Terrence Malick, 2011) Terrence Malick's cogitation on creation sounds trite on paper, not least if you were to describe its climactic, bathetic vision of heaven.
The energetic and breezily disreputable 2010 comic-book adaptation Kick-Ass, about the bathetic crime-fighting efforts of a nerdy teenager (Aaron Taylor- Johnson) in a homemade superhero costume, offered a refreshing antidote to the self-seriousness of most other Hollywood superhero films.
The new film Diana is, by turns, vivid, bathetic , moving, torrid and subversive.
Kitson won the Perrier Comedy Award in 2002, at the age of twenty-five, and his gift is for the crafting of exquisite narratives, shows shaped like Alice Munro stories, bathetic and beautiful.
The effect is bullying, and, worse, bathetic : we have probably already predicted the joke by the time we reach its italicization.
The sequence could have been bathetic , but it carries surprising emotional weight, and the conversation that follows hints at a fascinating possibility: less a conventional coming-out story than an exploration of how Jamal's gayness and his history of abuse might be co-opted and marketed, a new brand for a new era.
Show more... Source & Trust
93%
Authority and reliability
Real-world application tested
The word "bathetic" functions primarily as an adjective . It modifies nouns to describe something characterized by bathos, meaning a sudden shift from a serious or elevated subject to a trivial or ridiculous one. Ludwig shows how it adds a critical or dismissive tone.
Expression frequency: Very common
