Bathos
Etymology
From Greek "bathos," "depth." The literary sense was coined by Alexander Pope in his 1727 satire Peri Bathous, or the Art of Sinking in Poetry, a mock-treatise inverting Longinus’s revered essay on the sublime. Where the sublime lifts, bathos sinks — sometimes by a writer’s design, often by their failure.
noun · /BAY-thos/
An abrupt, deflating drop from lofty language or feeling into the trivial or absurd.
What it names
The sentence that soars and then thuds — “for God, for country, and for a decent parking spot” — naming the specific comic or clumsy collapse from the elevated to the banal.
Example
The eulogy built to a trembling climax about eternity and then landed in bathos: “He will be missed, especially at trivia night.”
Related idea
Bathos is the unintended or comic plunge from high to low; pathos is the genuine evocation of pity or sorrow.