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What is the name for the rhetorical device used in this sentence?Is it bathos, or is that something else?

quote:
He has a wife, two children, four grandchildren, and a tractor.


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bathos

Works for me.


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Wasn't Bathos one of the Three Musketeers?


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No, a bathos is where you go to meet other men.
 
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I thought you'd find women frum da 'hood there - bat hos


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Is it a rhetorical device, though? Maybe I am splitting hairs, which I have a tendency of doing.
 
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I'd say so. Why not? Provided it was intentional, of course, which this example was, clearly.


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Provided it was intentional, of course, which this example was, clearly.

Ah, the intention of the Other. So, what is unintentional bathos? (In keeping with the rapidly declining standards of the age, Bath OS is a new, Britain-made operating system which runs on Somerset architecture computers.


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Bathos is the introduction of some jarringly out-of-place idea that produces amusement in the reader/listener. Often analogies are used like Douglas Adams's The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.

A naive writer will sometimes intoduce accidental bathos - from some excerpts I've read Dan Brown (The da Vinci Code, et al) is a prime source for unintended humour.

The notorious Scottish poetaster William McGonagall was also a great unconcious user of bathos. For example, from Jottings of New York:
quote:
Oh, mighty city of New York, you are wonderful to behold--
Your buildings are magnificent-- the truth be it told--
They were the only thing that seemed to arrest my eye,
Because many of them are thirteen storeys high


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quote:
Oh, mighty city of New York, you are wonderful to behold--
Your buildings are magnificent-- the truth be it told--
They were the only thing that seemed to arrest my eye,
Because many of them are thirteen storeys high
Proof, if any be needed, that rhyme and meter don't necessarily make for good poetry.


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Proof, if any be needed, that rhyme and meter don't necessarily make for good poetry.

Was that directed at me? Oh, now that I read it again, perhaps not.
 
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Was that directed at me?

Nope.


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On an aviation site that I frequent a writer described the climbing ability of a certain light airplane thus: "It has all the climbing ability of a homesick manhole cover." That upends the "homesick angel" analogy often heard, with great bathic - and comic- effect, IMHO.


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Proof, if any be needed, that rhyme and meter don't necessarily make for good poetry.
Ain't it the truth? Some of my favorite poems lack meter and rhymes.
 
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rhyme and meter

I should have typed, unvaried or fixed meter, because in truth all linguistics utterances are metrical.

[Edited: Added missing copula.]

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