Pathos

For those who don't know, this word is pronounced with the emphasis on the last syllable. Well, like glamor and pathos , as they say now. This is what I mean. I’ve long wanted to write about the word pretentious, but I kept waiting for it to settle down a little, settle down, and occupy its specific niche. Otherwise, when a new word is implanted into the language, at first it sometimes causes such inflammation that you can’t even see anything. But now it seems normal.

The word pretentious is from a series of adjectives that have recently come into fashion such as elite (along with the old elite), comfortable (plus the old comfortable). So here too - there was the word pathetic, then pathetic appeared . And in all cases the story is similar: first, a simpler word-forming variant enters the language with a new meaning, sharing spheres of influence with the old and more complex variant, and then the new variant simply displaces the old one, capturing all the meanings.

I really thought that the word pretentious didn’t exist at all before. It turned out I was wrong. Infrequently, the pretentious option was used along with the pathetic. Here's a funny example. N. Krupskaya once wrote a devastating review of Chukovsky’s children’s poems: “The author puts pathetic speech, a parody of Nekrasov, into the mouth of a crocodile. Find out, dear friends, My soul is shaken. I saw so much grief there. Even you, hippopotamus, would howl like a puppy. Whenever I could see him..." [N.K. Krupskaya. About “Crocodile” by Chukovsky (1928)].

Both pathetic and pretentious go back to the concept of pathos. Pathos is a category of ancient rhetoric; Aristotle (he identified pathos, ethos and logos as elements of rhetoric) associated pathos with the idea that the tragedy of a hero causes an aesthetic experience and an emotional uplift in the audience. Hegel associated pathos not only with tragedy, but also with solemn and sublime aesthetics. The term pathos is still used in literary theory, aesthetics, etc. They even say this: the pathos of my speech... is the main idea, the goal, that is.

Unlike the words pathos and pathetic, which could always, of course, indicate excessive emotionality and exaltation, but might not express the ideas of exaggeration and falsehood, the adjective pathos (like the adverb pathos) from the very beginning gravitated precisely towards the latter type of contexts: First , as always, I didn’t like everything: the tasteless cathedral, and the theatrical priest with a pretentious speech, I even thought: well, just like a communist agitator at a factory in the way he speaks. [N.N. Punin. Diaries. Letters. (1921-1931).]

“I believed in love,” I answered so pathetically that I wanted to spit. [G. Shcherbakova. A Prayer for Eve (2000).] This old meaning of the word pretentious is extremely active today. The fact that such a word has a negative assessment is quite understandable: it is generally characteristic of Russian culture, with an extreme love for sincerity, that it is wary of the demonstrative verbal expression of high feelings.

But at the turn of the millennium, the word pretentious acquired a new meaning. They started saying: pretentious brands, pretentious car, pretentious party, pretentious club.

A pretentious car is not quite the same as a prestigious one, not quite the same as a high-status one, not quite the same as a cool one, not quite the same as a show-off. Not the same as elite. And of course, not the same as just dear.

Although the idea of ​​high cost is there, of course. Pathos cannot be publicly accessible. And, of course, there is the idea of ​​“showing off” too. But unlike show-off, which is usually out of nowhere, pathos, by design, in any case, is based on real merits. Pathetic means containing some message, a message about a person’s status. But not in the same way as status. Status records a person’s status, but does not shout about it. And in the pathos, a gesture is very important, a certain claim, namely an application for a special status.

On automobile forums, people are actively discussing which Mercedes or BMW models can be considered pretentious. By the way, not necessarily the most expensive.

The word pretentious is often used quite seriously and with a positive assessment:
Breitling watches are an absolutely atypical luxury brand, but just as respected, pretentious and technologically advanced as all other works of Swiss masters. www.lontime.ru/breitling/article_breitling_3.html

But for many people, the word pretentious contains ideas of nouveau riche, lack of taste, deliberateness, pretentiousness - which is not surprising if you remember the old meaning of this word: “the pretentious brand Chanel ” no, pathos is “ Gucci” , and “Chanel” is a classic . www.lookatme.ru/flows/fashion_news/posts/80095-chanel-protiv-dc

This negative assessment is presented in concentrated form in the disparaging word pathosnya, which correlates with different meanings of the word pathos and can characterize people (majors), brands, texts, and many other things:

The prices are cosmos, the people are pretentious, in the worst sense of the word. At parties, the dress code and face are implemented . http://forum.camry-club.su/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=958&start=15

A bullshit film, a waste of time, pathetic in short. IMHO www.lvhh.lv/forum/archive/index.php/t-1605-p-43.html

It seems to me that this is pretentiousness (there’s no other way to call it) about ideologue warriors, a big PR stunt... But... it’s time to ask the veterans... how many of them fought for Stalin? http://forumtyurem.net/index.php?showtopic=5099&st=40&start=40

I like this new meaning of the word pretentious. I like it not only because of its intelligent origins, but also because it very clearly reflects the time. When a new era arrived, the social structure of society began to become more complex. Therefore, those fragments of vocabulary that describe the social recognition of the person himself and his environment could not help but become more complex. Of course, there were such words as prestigious and authoritative before, but this turned out to be not enough (by the way, let us remember what happened to the word authoritative during Perestroika). Such words carry an unknown assessment. So new ones appeared in addition to them ( pretentious, status, image , etc.). Behind the word pretentious there was an assessment from a very clearly defined social type of person, with certain values ​​and preferences - initially, at least.

I like the word pretentious in one more respect. After all, no one will say that this is again an English tracing paper, as if one’s own words are not enough. Because in English the word pathetic, coming from the same Greek source, has developed almost opposite meanings - pitiful, touching, heartbreaking, pathetic...

Irina Levontina