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pathetic fallacy

noun

  1. the endowment of nature, inanimate objects, etc., with human traits and feelings, as in the smiling skies; the angry sea.


pathetic fallacy

noun

  1. (in literature) the presentation of inanimate objects in nature as possessing human feelings
“Collins English Dictionary — Complete & Unabridged” 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012
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Word History and Origins

Origin of pathetic fallacy1

Coined by John Ruskin in Modern Painters Vol. III, Part IV (1856)
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Example Sentences

The emphasis is on getting the landscape to echo, very precisely, the mood; Caron uses the phrase “pathetic fallacy”.

With pathetic fallacy worthy of Shakespeare, rain and wind lashed the island of Manhattan as I clutched my voice recorder from the back seat of my taxi heading uptown.

The Victorian critic John Ruskin coined the phrase “pathetic fallacy” to describe the morbid attribution of human feelings to animals and inanimate objects.

I like a little pathetic fallacy now and again, but that is as far as it goes.

The whole landscape is grey and dark with pathetic fallacy, as though you have been transported to a 19th-century novel.

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