bathos

Pronounced: BAY-thas (alt: BAY-thos), noun

Notes: I think I’ve heard or read this word, but did not know the meaning

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Yesterday’s word

The word subreption is “the act of obtaining something (such as a prize or reward) by concealing pertinent facts”

First usage

Our word came into English in the late 1500s

Background / Comments

I ran across this word in my reading; specifically, in the Nero Wolfe story Please Pass the Guilt by Rex Stout. In a humorous section, Nero Wolfe is dictating a proposed article to Archie Goodwin: ‘…by fraud. Period’ — No. Instead of ‘fraud’ make it ‘by subreption’. It’s more precise and will add to vocabularies. Paragraph. I had to smile at this because it added to my vocabulary, as I had to look up the word to see how it was more precise than ‘fraud’. Our word comes from the Latin word subreptiōn, which is a stem of subreptiō (a stealing), related to the word subreptus, the past participle of subripere (to steal).

And, in an odd twist of happenstance, just about a week after this entry, one of my vocabulary sources listed subreption as its word-of-the-day.