Bathetic and Bathoic

A question has been raised about my use of the word "bathoic" in reference to Blagojevich rather than "bathetic." Bathos comes from the Greek word for depth (e.g. bathysphere) and has been used in that context as the depth or bottom: Samuel Johnson called a poem "the very bathos of insipidity." Pope redefined it in his poem Peri Bathous, a satire on contemporary poetry that he felt trivialized important subjects accidentally,thus debasing the very things they attempted to elevate. (One of his examples was presenting God as a baker.) More than presenting this art as low in the artistic hierarchy, he meant to show a decline, a distance between the high quality of artistic ancestors and the low quality of the descendants and hence a loss. Hogarth followed with his final etching, The Bathos, which shows more than just failure, it shows failure set in the relief of expectation. http://www.victorianweb.org/painting/18c/hogarth/30.html

The phrase "sublime to the ridiculous" first appears in Thomas Paine's Age of Man as "one step above the sublime makes the ridiculous, and one step above the ridiculous makes the sublime again." This implies a continuity, a rising progression from one to the other. Bathos, on the other hand does not; it implies a discontinuous fall closer to "the decline of the sublime to the ridiculous." It is used most often satirically, as anticlimax. And "bathetic" has become "syrupy, sentimental."

This fall, this decline, is lost in Samuel Johnson's--and the more humorous modern--meaning and I wanted to preserve it. My particular interest is the change of American leaders and culture over the years, the change from Washington to Nixon, from the world of ideas to conjecture. So I looked at "bathoic"--and coined it. I also decided to coin "Bathoe" and "Bathoes", to signify the principles in this decline.