1720s neologisms

legend

fictional race from Gulliver's Travels

In literature and the arts, bathos ( ; ,  "depth") is the use of a lofty, elegant, or elevated style to present silly, vulgar, or trivial subject-matter, or a sudden transition from the former to the latter, thereby creating a ludicrous or comedic effect. Nowadays, bathos can refer to such usage occurring either accidentally (through artistic ineptitude) or intentionally as a rhetorical device (usually for the sake of comedy). Originally, it referred to an amusingly failed attempt at presenting artistic greatness and was first used in this sense in Alexander Pope's 1727 essay "Peri Bathou