tragicize

English

Etymology

From tragic +‎ -ize.

Pronunciation

• (General American) IPA^(key): /ˈtɹæd͡ʒɪsaɪz/

Verb

tragicize (third-person singular simple present tragicizes, present participle tragicizing, simple past and past participle tragicized)

1. (obsolete, rare) To speak or write in the manner of a tragedy; to adopt a grandiloquent style.
   • 1840, John Henry Newman, The Church of the Fathers, section VIII:

     How shall I omit those ungardenlike gardens, void of pot-herbs? or the Augean store, which we cleared out and spread over them; what time we worked the hillside plough, vine-planter I, and awful you, with this neck and hands, which still bear the marks of the toil (O earth and sun, air and virtue! for I will tragicize a bit), not the Hellespont to yoke, but to level the steep.

2. (rare) To turn (someone or something) into tragedy; to make tragic.
   • 1972, Mohan Singh Uberoi, I Believe, page 19:

     I like to be tragic, I like to be funny / For in less than a century / Comic will have been tragicized / Tragedy comicalized.

   • 2009, Joseph Litvak, The Un-Americans: Jews, the Blacklist, and Stoolpigeon Culture, page 156:

     Fired and, in effect, executed too, Phillip Loeb had to be tragicized, like the Rosenbergs […].