‘His command of extravagant action and idiom never flags.’ Peter Pierce on Chris Flynn’s new novel, The Glass Kingdom, in the Australian.
This Atlantic piece will give you some useful background information on the Hachette/Amazon tussle.
What I mean is that with its blunt authority the New Oxford definition of “pathos” — “a quality that evokes pity or sadness” — shuts down the conversation, it shuts down your thinking about the word, while the Webster’s version gets your wheels turning: it seems so much more provisional — “that which awakens tender emotions, such as pity, sorrow, and the like; contagious warmth of feeling, action, or expression; pathetic quality; as, the pathos of a picture, of a poem, or of a cry” — and therefore alive. You’re using the wrong dictionary.
