Does anyone say, "I may be wrong" more disingenuously? Is there anyone more aggressively watchable because he is so awful? Okay, there's CNN's Robert Novak and Paul Begala. And, in the old days, John McLaughlin. However, Bill O'Reilly is so compellingly odious, you almost can't take your eyes off him. I wonder how much of his ratings are based on hathos — the enjoyment you get from hating someone, the same delicious feeling you get reading a Paul Krugman column or listening to Senator Biden.

The patron saint of hathos connoisseurs, H.L. Mencken, was a brave soul, but even a fellow as sturdy and unstinting as he might have been struck dumb in the presence of the extravagantly hathotic Kathie Lee Gifford. The literary hero of the hathos-addicted is A Confederacy of Dunces' Ignatius J. Reilly, who would spend his afternoons watching trash movies in the Prytania Theater, thoroughly appalled, bellowing out his critiques of the cinematic abominations before him and having a grand old time.

Movies are a reliable source of hathos (two words: Cutthroat Island), but television is a more convenient provider, and you don't even have to leave home to get your recommended daily allowance of the delightfully horrible. Why pay good money and drive to the multiplex to obtain hathos when The Ricki Lake Show beams it in every weekday for free?

hathos (hay'thos) n., pl. double hathos A pleasurable sense of loathing, or a loathing sense of pleasure, aroused by certain schlocky, schmaltzy or just- plain-bad show-business personalities: "Hearing the audience applaud when Dr. Joyce Brothers told Merv Griffin that, aside from being a brilliant comedienne, Charo is a 'genius on the classical guitar' filled me with hathos." [American: hate/happy pathos lachrymose (?)] — ha-thot-ic adj.