Words and Depths and Bathos and Bathyscaphe and Bathetic and Bathos and Bathysmal and Bathukolpian and bathyseism and bathycolpian

As is often the case, a funny thing happened to me on my way to another word. I was reviewing some of the spelling words in the (Junior) National Spelling Bee and came across "bathyseism." I looked at it for a moment and saw the Greek word "bathos," meaning "depth," but then I went right to the ending, "ism," and thought that it must have to do with some kind of ideology. I was wrong, because, as now seems obvious to me, the second part of the word relates to "seismic," a word which has entered into everyone's vocabulary as earthquakes get more press in our times.

So, I learned that "bathyseism" relates to an earthquake of deep origin that is recorded by our scientific instruments. It is a noun. Using the third-grade sentence I learned to express what a noun is, one can say "the bathyseism walks." Perhaps it would be beter to say the "It was a bathyseism of 6.5 magnitude."I was only curious but not really deeply interested in bathyseism.

Bathos

It was bathos and related terms that interested me. I wanted to distinguish it from pathos and learn more about it. Although the word bathos has a 17th century attestation, it entered into the language in its more usual meaning, a rhetorical term meaning a "ludicrous descent from the elevated to the commonplace in writing or speech; anticlimax," through Alexander Pope in 1727. He, like most 18th century English intellectuals, spent his time meditating on Longinus' work On the Sublime (Peri hupsous) and wondering about the ecstatic states that Longinus promoted. The title of that work got Pope to thinking and he wrote, "While a plain and direct road is paved to their 'hupsos,' or sublime, no track has been yet chalked out to arrive at our 'bathos,' or profound." Hm. how deep. And so the word bathos grew and gave birth to a bunch of related terms, several of which are not in the OED but appear in other unabridgeds, relating to depths.

A Few Scientific Usages

We all know some of the scientific combinations. Along with bathyseism, we have a bathyscaph(e), the name which the Swiss scientist Auguste Piccard gave his deep-sea diving vessel in 1947 or a bathysphere, which was its predecessor diving apparatus for deep-sea observation. Something that is bathypelagic pertains to or inhabits the intermediate depths of the sea [though that concept is interesting because pelagic suggests either the open sea or the surface of the open sea]. Bathylimnetic creatures are those that inhabit the depths of freshwater lakes ('limne' means 'pool'). There is also a word bathysophical that is defined as "pertaining to knowledge of the depths of the sea or what is found there," but I would tend to prefer the unattested bathology or bathylogy to be the study of the sea depths. Maybe there is a related term I don't know.

Claiming Bathos for the Humanities

There are several possible word choices for those who would like to use the term in everyday speech. A bathos is the lowest phase or bottom of something, but can also be used to mean "a commonplace." For example, an absurd bathos might be a mindless cliche that is uttered: "what doesn't kill me makes me stronger [plainly not true, however]," while one can also speak of the bathos of stupidity or the bathos of insipidity. "That speech explored the bathos of insipidity." It then would be a synonym for "lower reaches" or "depths." I'll pass by bathycolpian (or bathukolpian) quickly lest the sexually correct police, of whom there are tons these days, think that sexual terms are part of living. It means "deep-bosomed," and sounds like a word Homer would use to describe one of the nurturant or motherly goddesses in ancient Greece. Don't you think it is much nicer to think of some women as bathukolpian rather than simply stacked or bosomy or whichever other words guys use? The terms I really like, however, are bathetic and bathysmal. The former is also attested as bathotic and means "'sinking' rhetorically" as in "He wrote a bathetic and impotent epic." But this seems unduly limited. Why not expand it a bit to be a combination of bathos and pathetic and mean something that is deeply unsatisfying? Since pathetic really suggests something that stimulates the emotions, bathetic could be something that is emotionally stimulating but in a negative way. A bathetic performance, for example. It would relive all the pressure from pathetic, one of American's most overused words.But, in my mind, bathysmal is even better. It's OED definition is "of or pertaining to the bottom of the deeper parts of the sea," but I would like to see it mean an especially bathetic performance. Thus, we would have something of a gradation. "Adequate, poor, bathetic and then bathysmal." But, use of the "ysmal" reminds me of "abyss" and "abysmal," to which I now turn.

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