If you're giving a speech about foreign policy and suddenly you start telling knock-knock jokes, your audience may squirm in their seats and wonder why you've taken a turn toward the bathetic. You've gone from serious and high-minded to trite, and that's bathetic.
Bathetic can also mean sappy or sentimental. Those TV commercials that show people teary-eyed over their catfood can be termed bathetic. Bathetic (the noun is bathos) comes from the Greek word for "depth” — but here the “depth” is low, not profound. Ever heard of the Bathysphere, a spherical submarine invented in the late 1920s? Scientists could climb into it and be lowered into the deep sea to study marine life. Don't confuse bathetic with pathetic, which means "pitiful."
