Pathos is a quality that stirs emotions. A song with a lot of pathos hits

Noun
PATHein
Pathos is a quality that stirs emotions. A song
with a lot of pathos hits you right in the heart. Ever notice how some songs
or movies appeal to your brains, while others appeal to your feelings? The ones
that are all about feeling are full of pathos, an appeal to emotions that originally
meant "suffering" in Greek. Often, this word has to do specifically with pity and
sympathy: when someone tells a story about people suffering that makes you feel
for them, that's pathos.
DEFINITIONS AND USAGE EXAMPLES
 a quality that arouses emotions (especially pity or sorrow)
 “the film captured all the pathos of their situation”
 a feeling of sympathy and sorrow for the misfortunes of others
 a style that has the power to evoke feelings
PRONUNCIATION
Directions: Discuss the meaning of the word with your students, with
\ˈpā-ˌthäs, -ˌthȯs, -ˌthōs also ˈpa-\
special emphasis on any variations or nuances of the word specific to
your discipline. Consider taking it a step further by using one or all of
the following ideas as you involve students with the new vocabulary.
Remember to preview all content you intend to share with students. Not all items on the lists provided below are
appropriate for all classes or age levels.
 General Interest/Technology
From The New York Times Magazine: “The Secret Life of Passwords”
WE DESPISE THEM – YET WE IMBUE THEM WITH OUR HOPES AND DREAMS, OUR DEAREST MEMORIES, OUR
DEEPEST MEANINGS. THEY UNLOCK MUCH MORE THAN OUR ACCOUNTS.
SEVERAL YEARS AGO I began asking my friends and family to tell me their passwords. I had come to
believe that these tiny personalized codes get a bum rap. Yes, I understand why passwords are universally
despised: the strains they put on our memory, the endless demand to update them, their sheer number. I hate
them, too. But there is more to passwords than their annoyance. In our authorship of them, in the fact that we
construct them so that we (and only we) will remember them, they take on secret lives. Many of our passwords
are suffused with pathos, mischief, sometimes even poetry. Often they have rich back stories. A motivational
mantra, a swipe at the boss, a hidden shrine to a lost love, an inside joke with ourselves, a defining emotional
scar — these keepsake passwords, as I came to call them, are like tchotchkes of our inner lives. They derive
from anything: Scripture, horoscopes, nicknames, lyrics, book passages. Like a tattoo on a private part of the
body, they tend to be intimate, compact and expressive.
LANGUAGE ARTS
(Ok, this one is definitely NOT to be shared with general audiences, but
it is an interesting article about Jack Kerouac, and DOES use the word
“pathos.”)
From Salon: “Jack Kerouac, Misogynist Creep: Inside His Ugly Infatuation with
Marilyn Monroe”
In 1962, he was 40 years old and far removed from the callow youth of his Columbia days.
What would prompt a worldly, middle-aged man to emote such adolescent contempt for a
woman whose life and death had been heartbreaking? Aristotle, one of Nick Butler’s
darlings, might have lectured Kerouac about pathos. He likely would have failed to move his
emotional needle. After all, Kerouac has emerged as a prototype of the mid-century modern
misogynist.
http://www.salon.com/2015/10/11/jack_kerouacs_unhealthy_infatuation_with_marilyn_monr
oe_partner/
From Time:
“Elena Ferrante May Be the Finest Author You’ve Never Heard Of”
The anonymous Italian author is becoming an icon
Once upon a TIME, there were two girls who lived in the slums of Naples. One was the daughter of a
shoemaker; the other, the daughter of a porter. They played together, dared each other, there was an
evil magician–or perhaps he was just a terrible old man–there was a lost doll … Suddenly, there’s no
turning back, you’re in for the duration. Once Elena Ferrante starts writing about these girls–The
Story of the Lost Child, the fourth and final book in her Neapolitan series, has just been published–
you have no choice but to keep reading. The two girls will become women. They will succeed, fail, fall
in and out of love and bear children. They will transcend the ignorance and ugliness of their
neighborhood and be trapped by it; they will transcend Italy’s expectations for women over the past
60 years and be trapped by them.
But that doesn’t begin to describe the world of Elena Ferrante, the author of four previous novels,
which comes to us through the lens of her remarkable translator, Ann Goldstein. We are dealing with
masterpieces here, old-fashioned classics, filled with passion and pathos. Never bathos [See below for
the difference]. Ferrante is too precise, too aware of the emotional complexities of any given moment
for this story to descend into suds. Unfortunately, there is little straight-out humor, or clever banter–
Ferrante is too obsessed for diversions–but, happily, there is no cynicism either.
http://time.com/4038085/elena-ferrante-may-be-the-finest-author-youve-never-heard-of/
WHAT’S UP WITH “PATHOS” AND “BATHOS”?
THESE TWO LITERARY TERMS ARE OFTEN CONFUSED . . .
http://theyuniversity.tumblr.com/post/15279188661/whats-upwith-pathos-and-bathos
 ART
From The LA Times:
“Kathleen Henderson's Drawings Are as Searing and Tough as Ever”
"Parade," another image that reverberates with humor and pathos, features a procession of
men, women and children, marching in their underwear. Some play musical instruments.
Some wield huge, primitive clubs. All are reduced to their crude, lumpy essence. This motley
assembly is us. This is humanity, doing its clumsy, endearing thing. "Parade" echoes the
irreverent crowd scenes of James Ensor and Diane Arbus' disarming photographs of the
marginalized and freakish.
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-kathleen-hendersons-drawings-searing-and-tough20141020-story.html
From The Guardian
“Why are so many people moved by this wedding photograph?”
This photograph is silly, not beautiful. The framing of the newlyweds against a brooding
thundery seascape is absurdly trite. It has the fake feeling and gooey pathos of a really awful
1970s poster or Jack Vettriano’s The Singing Butler. There is no humour in this conjunction of
love and nature, no humanising irony. Instead we are supposed to be genuinely moved by the
“amazing” sight of that tiny couple under a Viking sky. It is positively Wagnerian in all its
stormy soullessness.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/01/sydney-wedding-photograph
From Los Angeles Times:
Bronze Sculptures in ‘Power and Pathos’ at the Getty Capture Pivotal Era”
A fundamental transformation in art is crystallized through a savvy juxtaposition of two extraordinary
sculptures. It's a marvelous example of how artful exhibition design can advance curatorial
interpretation of extraordinary works of art, illuminating history.
The life-size statue of a seated boxer, an extremely rare example of a fully preserved Greek bronze
from the third century BC, shows a bearded, brawny, heavily muscled and mature man. His shoulders
slump, elbows resting on his thighs. Fur-lined leather gloves are prominently bound to his wrists and
forearms. One hand falls slack across the other, underlining his larger pose of total exhaustion.
A brutal fight has just ended. The weary boxer, his cheeks swollen and mouth slightly ajar, turns his
head up and to his extreme right. He looks across the room.
There, his line of sight lands
squarely on the life-size bronze
statue of a victorious young
athlete astride a pedestal,
otherwise famously known as the
Getty Bronze. Lithe and elegant,
and almost as complete in its
preservation as the boxer
sculpture, a perfect youth is
shown raising a now-missing
laurel wreath. A champion crowns
himself with glory. . . .
It speaks volumes.
The Hellenistic Mediterranean represents the era when a humanistic heart began to beat vigorously
within Western art. Before, in Classical Greece, art promoted a ritualized, sometimes remote, even
chilly Olympian ideal. Now, lived experience was being embodied. Pathos, as the show's title identifies
this new aesthetic charge, flows like an electric current within these two powerful sculptures — and
between them.
MATH
Book Review: Uncle Petros and Goldbach’s Conjecture
In the tradition of Fermat's Last Theorem and Einstein's Dreams, a
novel about mathematical obsession
Goldbach's Conjecture is an idea first postulated two
hundred and fifty years ago, that any even number is the
sum of two primes. Despite its deceptive simplicity, it
remains unverified to this day.
As a tie-in to the publication of this book, Faber have offered
$1 million to anyone who proves it within two years. But
don't go rushing off for your calculators just yet - given the
history of the problem, you're more likely to be crushed to
death by a rogue blancmange than get the prize. It's a great
publicity stunt and a cunning move on Faber's part: they
know their money is safe. Let's hope they use the increased
sales of the book to donate some money to the Home for
Frustrated Mathematicians.
But to return to the book: Uncle Petros is the black sheep of
the Papachristos family, which is what attracts his insatiably
curious nephew, the unnamed hero of the story, towards
him. Having been warned off having anything to do with Petros, our lovable young scamp naturally
enough finds out all he can about his reclusive relative, and discovers that far from being the 'failure'
the rest of the family brands him, he is—or was—a world-class mathematician wrestling with one of
the most famous problems in the field. This inspires the nephew to become a mathematician himself,
despite Petros's discouragement, until in desperation, trying to save his nephew from the same fate,
Petros is persuaded to narrate his own tragic tale of hope, despair and Number Theory.
Doxiadis's achievement is to convey the drama and pathos of Petros's quest for the proof of one of the
great unproven theories of mathematics, without losing the attention of innumerate (and
innumerable) readers.
http://www5.geometry.net/theorems_and_conjectures/goldbach's_conjecture_page_no_4.html
SCIENCE
From The New York Times:
“Living with Cancer: Hiding under a Wig?”
. . . In her book, The Cancer Journals, Audre Lorde was
voluble in her attack on prostheses, inveighing especially
against bra inserts and breast reconstruction. Her
objections to cancer patients engaging in any and all
forms of camouflaging went well beyond the fact that in
her historical moment surgical implants could be
dangerous.
. . . [In] “Power vs. Prosthesis,” . . . one of her book
chapters, [she argues that] . . . by denying the mutilations
of cancer treatments . . . we become complicit in a culture
that refuses to acknowledge its manufacturing and
marketing of carcinogenic products. Women, she
cautioned, ought not to conform to some ridiculous
definition of what constitutes attractive femininity. Like
the honorable wounds of war, scars and lopsidedness, a
flat chest and hair loss bear witness to the disfigurement
resulting from the battle against disease. . . .
Could it be that a prosthesis is not a lie but a costume that
allows us to pass as healthy people? Or perhaps it allows
us to experiment with a series of personae that short
circuit the pathos produced by thinking of oneself as a
victim. When a misshapen, aberrant, or downright ugly body emerges from treatment — if only in
one’s own mind’s eye (and what other eyes count?) — there is no need to be tethered to it. What else is
artistry for?
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/10/09/living-with-cancer-hiding-under-a-wig/
MARKETING
From Forbes (leadership):
“How Mario Cuomo’s 1984 Speech Electrified His Audience”
Cuomo’s 1984 speech relied heavily on what Aristotle called Pathos
(emotion), storytelling. In this brilliant portion of the speech, Cuomo
accomplishes two things in one paragraph—he establishes Ethos (credibility)
and connects with the audience through Pathos, the story of his immigrant
father.
“That struggle to live with dignity is the real story of the shining city. And it’s a story, ladies and gentlemen,
that I didn’t read in a book, or learn in a classroom. I saw it and lived it, like many of you. I watched a small
man with thick calluses on both his hands work 15 and 16 hours a day. I saw him once literally bleed from the
bottoms of his feet, a man who came here uneducated, alone, unable to speak the language, who taught me all I
needed to know about faith and hard work.”
From Forbes (leadership):
“Public Speaking Payoff: The Presentation Worth $55,000 a Minute”
Human rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson received the longest standing ovation in the history of the
globally famous TED conference. In his March 2012 speech titled, “We Need To Talk About An
Injustice,” the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative shared his concerns about the racial imbalance
in America’s justice system. It was such a remarkable event that Stephen Colbert’s first question to
Stevenson on The Colbert Report was, “What were you talking about that got those ‘brainy types’ all
excited?”
Stevenson knows a few things about
persuasion. He argues cases in front of the
U.S. Supreme Court—and wins. His 18minute TED talk also won big. In addition
to giving Stevenson a standing ovation, the
audience assembled in the auditorium that
day donated $1 million to Stevenson’s nonprofit organization, the equivalent of
$55,000 per minute that he spoke.
. . . Stevenson concluded the presentation by telling the TED audience that they cannot be fully
evolved human beings until they care about human rights and basic dignity. “I’ve simply come to tell
you to keep your eyes on the prize, hold on.” Stevenson’s audience rose to their feet because his stories
had connected with them. He had touched their souls. Stevenson has what Aristotle called “pathos.”
Aristotle is one of the founding fathers of communication theory. He believed that persuasion occurs
when three components are represented: ethos, logos, and pathos. Ethos is credibility. We tend to
agree with people whom we respect for their achievements, title, experience, etc. Logos is the means
of persuasion through logic, data, and statistics. Pathos is the act of appealing to emotions.
 PERFORMING ARTS
Pathos in Music
Here are some examples of pathos in
music:

Sarah McLachlan's “Arms of an Angel”
played on ASPCA commercials “You're in the
arms of an Angel; may you find some
comfort here”
https://youtu.be/IO9d2PpP7tQ

The song “God Bless the USA” is a song by Lee Greenwood that became very popular after the 911
attacks. https://youtu.be/Q65KZIqay4E

A Sousa march can inspire and evoke patriotism https://youtu.be/a-7XWhyvIpE

A song or musical composition written in a minor key conveys sadness or lost hope
https://youtu.be/8dcfpH8oJoM (“Hey Jude” recorded by the Beatles in minor scale)

Weird Al Yankovic’s songs appeal to the sense of humor of the listener and can make him feel happier
https://youtu.be/Fd1LDnD7z9c (“Yoda” by Weird Al Yankovic)

Songs with a fast, energetic beat are often used to lift a listener’s mood https://youtu.be/y6Sxv-sUYtM
(“Happy” – Pharrell Williams)

Soft instrumental music can make the listener contemplative or help him or her wind down
https://youtu.be/CcsUYu0PVxY

War protest songs stir the emotions, like: "Turn, Turn, Turn" by the Byrds and "Blowin’ in the Wind" by
Bob Dylan. https://youtu.be/68g76j9VBvM?list=PLituStUqjTeDi05EoU5Jx3WogoXKeh6Vs (“Ohio” by
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
From The New Yorker:
“Haters Gonna Hate: Listening to Ryan Adams’ ‘1989’”
. . . Still, as a longtime fan of Adams, I’ve been won over by his
commitment to surplus, to excess. It’s clear that he has a good
time making sad songs. This might seem like insincerity, like
pathos conjured out of thin air in a kind of musical magic trick.
But Adams’s confusing motivations have always been part of
whatever tension surrounds his music. Something in his state of
mind and musical sensibility listened to the romantic exuberance
of a young woman’s pop album and heard his own melancholy.
He responded with music that is both personal and generous.
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/hatersgonna-hate-listening-to-ryan-adams-1989
From The New York Times:
“Bach, Revisited Series Features Ensemble Signal”
Mr. Bezuidenhout’s brilliant technique was able to shine in Lars Ulrik
Mortensen’s arrangement for harpsichord of Bach’s Chaconne from the
D minor Partita for solo violin. But though Mr. Bezuidenhout’s
rendition was dazzling, Bach’s searching music lost much of its
emotional muscle played on a keyboard, with none of the heroic
struggle and pathos inherent in a violinist’s efforts to build worlds out
of a lone voice. Struggle and pathos were in no short supply in two
works by Ms. Gubaidulina that openly pay homage to Bach. The pianist
Daniel Pesca performed her student-day Chaconne with rich sonic
contrasts and solemn articulation of the eight-bar bass line that anchors
it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/11/arts/music/review-bach-revisited-series-features-ensemblesignal.html?_r=0
From The New York Times:
“Helen Mirren Stars in The Audience on Broadway”
Queen Elizabeth, you see, is one of us, or as much of one of us as she can be
given her extraordinary upbringing and imprisoning public role. The
compulsively watchable Ms. Mirren brings out the humor and the pathos in
this contradiction, though with slightly less precision than she did in London.
(She went up on her lines a few times in the preview performance I saw here.)
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/09/theater/review-the-audience-withhelen-mirren-opens-on-broadway.html
From The New York Times:
“A Wrenching Grief Assuaged with Beauty:
Jimmy Greene’s ‘Beautiful Life’ Is a Eulogy to a
Daughter”
The singing is just as expressively restrained on “Ana’s Way,”
which features Kurt Elling, and builds on a composition
previously titled “Ana Grace.” But the lyrics are far more
personal, eulogistic in tone and detail. And during the latter part
of the song, Mr. Elling is joined by a children’s chorus, made up
of Ana’s former classmates from a three-year stretch when the
Greenes lived in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Try as I might, I can claim
no pretense of objectivity with this song. I recoil slightly from the
searing pathos, but something — the sinuous Wayne Shorterish
melody, mixed with the inescapable back story — keeps me
locked in. Since I first heard it, “Ana’s Way” has been the track on
“Beautiful Life” that keeps replaying in my mind’s ear.
 SOCIAL SCIENCE
From The New York Times Magazine:
“The Death of Adulthood in American Culture”
. . . Maybe nobody grows up anymore, but everyone gets older. What happens to the boy rebels
when the dream of perpetual childhood fades and the traditional prerogatives of manhood are
unavailable? There are two options: They become irrelevant or they turn into Louis C. K. (fig. 5).
Every white American male under the age of 50 is some version of the character he plays on “Louie,” a
show almost entirely devoted to the absurdity of being a pale,
doughy heterosexual man with children in a post-patriarchal
age. Or, if you prefer, a loser.
The humor and pathos of “Louie” come not only from the
occasional funny feelings that he has about his privileges —
which include walking through the city in relative safety and
the expectation of sleeping with women who are much better
looking than he is — but also, more profoundly, from his
knowledge that the conceptual and imaginative foundations of
those privileges have crumbled beneath him. He is the center
of attention, but he’s not entirely comfortable with that. He
suspects that there might be other, more interesting stories
around him, funnier jokes, more dramatic identity crises, and he knows that he can’t claim them as
his own. He is above all aware of a force in his life, in his world, that by turns bedevils him and gives
him hope, even though it isn’t really about him at all. It’s called feminism.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/magazine/the-death-of-adulthood-in-american-culture.html
From U.S. New & World Report:
“Merkel Triggers Contrasting Images in Greece, Migrant Crises; but
Pragmatic Style Consistent”
BERLIN (AP) — In the space of two months, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has gone from being portrayed as
the heartless villain in Europe's debt crisis to the heroine of those flooding in to find refuge on the continent. . . .
A hallmark of Merkel's policy has always been pragmatism, rather
than pathos or vision. The change in perceptions doesn't mean a
change in Merkel's approach, said Manfred Guellner, the head of
the Forsa polling agency. "I think she is acting very pragmatically,
as ever — the stream of refugees is there, and she is trying to get a
grip on it," he said.
http://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2015/09/13/migrant-crisisadjusts-merkels-image-but-style-unchanged
From Time:
“Pistorius’ Tears Aren’t Necessarily a Sign of Innocence”
The optics were bad for Pistorius as the
prosecution laid out their case in the first part
of the trial. He has admitted to being
passionate about guns, and his friends say he
had a short temper. His texts with Steenkamp
sounded controlling and jealous, and his exgirlfriend said he was a jerk. And, on the
night of the killing, neighbors said they heard
the sounds of a screaming argument before
the gunshots. Then again, there’s a real
pathos to Pistorius’s story, if he’s telling the
truth. Pistorius might have been a controlling
cad, but he didn’t have a history of violence
against women. Pistorius’ fear of intruders
doesn’t seem fabricated, especially given the
crime levels in South Africa and his physical
disability. And it’s easy to imagine how a halfasleep, trigger-happy man might panic and
shoot, especially when he did not have his
prosthetic legs on and felt he couldn’t run
(Pistorius maintains he walked on his stumps
to the bathroom.)
http://time.com/56043/oscar-pistorius-reeva-steenkamp-courtroom-theatrics/
 SPORTS
From Newsweek:
“Where’s Kevin Ware? And other 2015 NCAA Tournament Observations”
Remember Kevin Ware? His story provided the
pathos for March Madness just two years ago. In
an Elite Eight game between Duke and Louisville,
Ware, then a sophomore guard for Louisville,
suffered a compound fracture of his lower right leg
after landing awkwardly on it while attempting to
block a three-point shot. Ware’s bone protruded
out of his skin, a sickening sight that caused three
of his teammates to fall to the court in spasms of
disbelief.
http://www.newsweek.com/wheres-kevin-wareand-other-2015-ncaa-tournament-observations314158
From The New York Times:
“Heartsick City Imports Hope: Johnny Manziel’s Arrival in Cleveland has
Fans Envisioning a Browns Renaissance”
Honeymoons can be short, though, even in Cleveland, where fans flock to
games despite the team’s dreadful record. This brand of pathos prompted
Scott O’Brien to create a coloring book called
“Why Is Daddy Sad on Sunday?” The book
depicts some of the most dispiriting moments in
Cleveland sports history, including the Drive, the
Fumble, the Shot, the Collapse and the Decision.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/31/sports/football/johnny-manziels-arrivalin-cleveland-has-fans-envisioning-a-browns-renaissance.html
WORLD LANGUAGES
From The Guardian:
“12 Untranslatable Words (and Their
Translations)”
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/21/12untranslatable-words-and-their-translations
We’d all like to believe in untranslatable words. It’s such a romantic thought: that there exist out
there, like undiscovered desert islands, ideas we have never even conceived of. Carefully guarded by
foreigners they have endured down the centuries, nuggets of culture overlooked by the rest of the
world.
There are a fair few linguistic and non-linguistic assumptions bound up in this romance, most of
which are decidedly dodgy. For example, the idea that any aspect of human experience could be
inaccessible to you just because you speak the wrong language. Or that if a language doesn’t have a
single word for a concept (that’s before we’ve even defined exactly what a “word” is), there can be no
way to express it. Then there’s the notion that words are a reliable key to the culture that uses them.
Drunken ones might have lots of ways to describe intoxication. Religious ones might have a rich
vocabulary for mystical states, and so on.
Then there are the often-cited examples themselves. They’re nearly all ridiculous, when you look at
them closely.
1) Hyggelig (Danish)
2) Saudade (Portuguese)
3) Utepils (Norwegian)
4) Aware (Japanese)
The same list renders this Japanese word as “the bittersweetness of a brief and fading
moment of transcendant beauty”. Or, as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has
it, “pathos”. A bit less of a mouthful.
5) Lítost (Czech)
6) Snow (English to Inuit)
7) Çekoslovakyalılaştıramadıklarımızdanmışsınız (Turkish)
8) Schnapsidee (German)
9) Waldeinsamkeit (German)
10)
Toska (Russian)
11)
Goya (Urdu)
12)
Razbliuto (Russian)