pathetic fallacy

American  

noun

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

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pathetic fallacy British  

noun

1. (in literature) the presentation of inanimate objects in nature as possessing human feelings

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Etymology

Origin of pathetic fallacy

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

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

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.

From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 25, 2019

There is a certain apt irony in poets’ abandonment of pathetic fallacy: The very technologies that helped them understand the broader world were twinned to those shaping it more and more aggressively than ever before.

From Slate ● Apr. 29, 2016

Somehow, it’s appropriate to find the pathetic fallacy informing a conversation about the making of what Smiley’s publishers are describing as “the literary event of 2014”.

From The Guardian ● Oct. 26, 2014

Mostly, heckling is just one example of the pathetic fallacy of fandom, that those of us in the seats are part of the action, essential to our team’s success—that we matter.

From The New Yorker ● Aug. 8, 2014

If he had such a conception he would frequently use in his descriptions what Ruskin calls the "pathetic fallacy," the use of which is excessively common in Tennyson.

From The Poetry Of Robert Browning by Brooke, Stopford A. (Stopford Augustus)