Today's Word

Accismus

ak-SIZ-muhs

Definition

(noun) A rhetorical term for feigned refusal of something you actually want, often used to appear modest or disinterested.

Example

Her accismus was evident when she said she didn’t want dessert, only to eagerly eat a slice of cake when offered.

Fun Fact

Accismus comes from the Greek word akkismós, meaning “coyness” or “affected indifference.” A classic example is the fox in Aesop’s fable who declares the grapes he cannot reach as sour. This term highlights the subtle art of expressing desire while pretending otherwise, a hallmark of both literary characters and real-world social interactions.

Previous Words

Bathetic

Today's Word

Bathetic

buh-THET-ik

Definition

(adjective) Producing an effect of anticlimax through a ridiculous or jarring transition from the elevated to the trivial.

Example

The speech had been genuinely moving until the final paragraph, where it collapsed into bathetic appeals about his own suffering that made the audience deeply uncomfortable.

Word Origin

Bathetic derives from bathos — a Greek word meaning “depth” — introduced into English literary criticism by Alexander Pope in his 1727 satirical work Peri Bathous, or the Art of Sinking in Poetry, a mock treatise on how to write badly. Pope used bathos to describe the jarring descent from the sublime to the ridiculous — the literary equivalent of a soaring aria ending in a pratfall. Bathetic entered English as the adjectival form, describing anything that achieves this effect whether intentionally or, more often, not.

Fun Fact

Alexander Pope’s Peri Bathous was one of literary history’s most devastating acts of criticism — a sustained, gleeful demolition of the bad writing Pope saw around him, disguised as a how-to guide. He invented bathos as a deliberate counterpart to hypsos — the Greek concept of the sublime — and populated his examples with real contemporary poets whose work he considered bathetic, thinly veiled behind mock-admiring descriptions. The work was so effective that several of its targets recognized themselves and responded furiously, producing exactly the kind of bathetic overreaction Pope had predicted. He spent the rest of his career cheerfully cataloguing their responses in subsequent editions.

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Accismus

Definition

Example

Previous Words

Bathetic

Bathetic

Definition

Example

Word Origin

Bathetic

Welter

Supercilious

Pallid

Prosaic