Pathos, in addition to sounding a lot like one of the three musketeers, is an important aspect of rhetoric. What is rhetoric, you ask? Rhetoric is constructive arguing. There's no such thing, you may say. Have you ever heard of constructive criticism?
Pathos is pathetic. Not in the way the Bush administration is pathetic, but in the way sharing a warm cup of cocoa around a toasty fire one late frosty Thursday afternoon is pathetic. Pathetic comes from the Greek παθητικός, pronounced like 'pathetos'. It means an appeal to emotion.
Pathos comes into play in rhetoric when you want to go beyond informing the reader, and actually touch them. You see, I could tell you all about the history of censorship in America, about all of the lawsuits that have arisen from the issue, about who's who in the national debate, about the actual ethics of censorship, but it probably wouldn't be very interesting, and most definitely wouldn't reach you. You would probably respond with a big, fat "who cares?"
If I really wanted to tell you about censorship in America, I would probably try to bring some emotion into my argument. I might try to show you some of the things that the press has hushhushed in the past few years. Or I might present some sort of hypothetical situation in which a family member was killed when they were sent off to Iraq, and the news, instead of being nice and all, ignored the tragedy because it was "too graphic". All of these techniques are employed because I want to make you feel some sort of emotions. The phrase "putty in my hands" morbidly describes this quite well.
Pathos doesn't go alone. As I may (or may not) talk about in some later posts, Pathos goes hand in hand with Ethos and Logos to form a persuasive argument.
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