#7: Bathetic
Definition:
characterized by triteness or sentimentalism
Example:
"Ironically this bloated historical drama about Hungary's failed democratic revolution of 1956 evokes nothing less than a Stalinist pageant: everyone on the right side of history is depicted as a morally enlightened superhuman, and a wash of bathetic music every few minutes is supposed to remind you how monumental the situation is." – Ben Sachs, ChicagoReader.com, September 8, 2011
About the Word:
When English speakers turned apathy into apathetic in the 1700s, using the suffix -etic to turn the noun into the adjective, they were inspired by pathetic, the adjectival form of pathos, from Greek pathētikos.
People also applied that bit of linguistic transformation to coin bathetic. In the 19th century, English speakers added the suffix -etic to bathos, the Greek word for "depth," which in English has come to mean "triteness" or "excessive sentimentalism." The result: the ideal adjective for the incredibly commonplace or the overly sentimental.
