Ink Tea Stone Leaf

Welcome back to my new weekly series, Vocab 128, in which I sit down with pen and paper and write 128 words beginning with the same letter, in more or less the order that I think of them, before scanning the page and posting it here. The result is a flex of my vocabulary muscles, an exposure of my handwriting to the world, and perhaps an insight into the psychology of my word associations.

Generally, I avoid words that are merely alternate forms of other words, and when I think of such a word I generally default to the appropriate noun form. Proper nouns I exclude as a rule (but we’ll see how that goes once I get to X).

This week’s definition from American Heritage Dictionary:

ba·thos (bāthŏs′, -thôs′)
n.
1.
a. An abrupt, presumably unintended juxtaposition of the exalted and the commonplace, producing a ludicrous effect.
b. An anticlimax.
2.
a. Insincere or grossly sentimental pathos: “a richly textured man who … can be … sentimental to the brink of bathos” (Kenneth L. Woodward).
b. Banality; triteness.
[Greek, depth, from bathus, deep.]