Today's Word

Sacrosanct

SAK-roh-sankt

Definition

(adjective) Regarded as too important or valuable to be interfered with.

Example

For many, the right to vote is sacrosanct.

Fun Fact

The concept of the “sacrosanct” has deep roots in ancient Roman religion and law, where certain temples, objects, and even people—like tribunes—were considered inviolable by decree. Harming them wasn’t just illegal; it was a religious offense. Today, the idea of sacrosanct still shows up in modern life: national constitutions, personal rituals (like morning coffee), and even time off from work are often treated as “off-limits” zones. It’s a word that’s moved from the sacred to the symbolic, and now shows up in debates over everything from privacy to free speech.

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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Sacrosanct

Definition

Example

Previous Words

Bathetic

Bathetic

Definition

Example

Word Origin

Bathetic

Welter

Supercilious

Pallid

Prosaic