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find the bodacious bandersnatch nipping at its heels. Try to picture the horripilating (“hairraising”) incident in the Voyages of Sinbad in which the
sailors are driven to mutiny by the strange cries of unseen monsters and the terror of the churning sea. If asked about the origins of the dreaded beast, a researcher into such things might say it is born of the scritching at the door of our imagination, and our eldritch fear of the unknown. However, the doughty Lewis Carroll dared name the dreaded beast in his diabolic poem “Jabberwocky.” “Beware the Jabberwock, my son! / The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! / Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun / The frumious Bandersnatch !” Companion words include catathleba , “a noxious monster,” which Pliny mentions in his Histories , and according to Coleridge, the deutyraun , which was “some monstrous animal.” Finally, there is the odious beast in Al Capp’s “Li’l Abner” cartoon strip, which he introduced “offstage” as the unseen but memorably named Lena the Hyena.

BARBARIAN
    An uncivilized, uncouth, uneducated foreigner. The Greeks and Romans disagreed on many issues, but they held fast to this suspicion of the outsider. Those who couldn’t speak their language were barbaros , stammerers or babblers. To both cultures, the speech of strangers was incomprehensible, reeking of roughhewn sounds like “bar bar bar to bar.” No inconsequential prejudice, this. If you couldn’t speak Greek you couldn’t compete in the Olympics, own land, or vote. If you couldn’t speak Latin, you were forever
regarded as pagan. Dr. Johnson holds forth on the evolution—or devolution—of the word, tracking down its origins in the fear and loathing of strangers: “[ Barbarian ] seems to have signified at first only foreign, or a foreigner; but, in time, implied some degree of wildness or cruelty.” Since then barbarians have arrived at the gate in virtually every land, as immigration and exile is now a constant in modern life, reviving the ancient disdain for strangers in the now universal phrase “It’s all Greek to me.” All is not lost. After being criticized by August Strindberg for the paintings he made in Tahiti, Paul Gauguin wrote, “You suffer from your civilization. My barbarism is to me a renewal of youth.” Companion words include gringo , a regional Mexican-Spanish expression for the dreaded Yanqui , often used, with almost shocking similarity, to describe gibberish spoken by strangers. Word maven John Ciardi traces its derivation back to griengar , “to speak like a Greek,” suggesting that American English was barbaric to Mexican ears, which brings us full circle, like Odysseus, back to Greece.

BATHOS
    False depth, sentimentality, triteness, mawkishness. Bathos is the sinking feeling of being pulled down by sentimentality, dragged down by false emotion. Bathos is exaggerated pathos, which, as readers of James Joyce, Thomas Aquinas, or Greek tragedy know, is the “quality that arouses pity or
sorrow.” The original sense of pathos is “what befalls one,” related to paskhein, to suffer, and penthos , grief, sorrow. So powerful were the old associations with pathos that when bathos , the old Greek word for “depth,” was floated by Alexander Pope, in 1727, its echo was clear to most educated people. Current usage suggests that bathos sinks to the depths of what used to be called “low writing,” in contrast to “high writing,” which is reputedly loftier. Bathos is also a synonym for anticlimax , the sudden descent to the depths, in the pejorative sense, in speech or writing or at the end of a work of art. Otherwise known as third-act problems. Or as Napoleon famously remarked to De Pradt, the Polish ambassador to France, a drop “from the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step.” Charlotte Brontë evoked its true profundity ( profundus , depth) in Jane Eyre , when she wrote: “I like you more than I can say, but I’ll not sink into a