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> For anyone who doesn't speak German, pathetisch means with pathos, impassioned.

It's the same in Romanian, and I guess many other languages.

Many of the common words of European languages are derived from Greek and Latin, and where the meaning has diverged in English, now (because of its ubiquity) these false friends are being realigned to mean what they do in English.



In Ancient Greek pathos also meant a kind of “existence is suffering”, so you could say that the English meaning of pathetic has come full circle.




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