| 词组 | piteous, pitiable, pitiful |
| 释义 | piteous, pitiable, pitiful What piteous, pitiable, and pitiful have in common is that each of them is used to mean "arousing pity or compassion." The OED notes that in this sense, piteous first occurred around 1290, pitiable in 1456, and pitiful around 1450. While all three words are still used in this way, piteous seems to occur a little less often than pitiable or pitiful: • ... the poor girl... raved and ran hither and thither in hysteric insanity—a piteous sight —W. M. Thackeray, Vanity Fair, 1848 • ... no piteous cry or agonised entreaty, would make them even look at me —Bram Stoker, Dracula, 1897 • ... that piteous or compassionate wish to say, or at least to report officially, no evil of the dead —James Gould Cozzens, Guard of Honor, 1948 • Poverty, to be picturesque, should be rural. Suburban misery is as hideous as it is pitiable —Anthony Trollope, The Macdermots of Ballycloran, 1847 • ... Gatsby, a man who happened to have a lot of money but was not a rich man, was made so pitiable that there were those who loved him —John O'Hara, Introduction to an edition of The Great Gatsby, 1945 • He felt a tender pity for her, mixed with shame for having made her pitiable —Bernard Malamud, The Assistant, 1957 • ... most pitiful and moving of all, perhaps, was the pretense—people with naked terror in their eyes still whistling to keep up their courage —Thomas Wolfe, Atlantic, February 1947 • As a woman, she had to feel sorry for any girl, no matter what a pitiful, poor, pathetic creature she was —James T. Farrell, What Time Collects, 1964 • ... has arrived at the knowledge that man is the pitiful victim of a pointless joke —Archibald MacLeish, Saturday Rev., 13 Nov. 1971 Pitiable and pitiful also share a second sense, "evoking mingled pity and contempt especially because of inadequacy." Pitiful is somewhat more frequent: • The resorting to epithets ... is a pitiable display of intellectual impotence —Morris R. Cohen, The Faith of a Liberal, 1946 • ... revolutionary rhetoric nourishes resentments and self-deceptions that are worse than ludicrous or pitiable —Benjamin DeMott, Atlantic, March 1970 • The most important impediment to obtaining efficient administrative officials ... has been the pitiful wage scale —Harry S. Truman, Message to Congress, 6 Sept. 1945 • The man who after Eugene O'Neill was our best playwright—I say was because his later plays have been pitiful travesties of his beautiful early ones — Simon 1980 Although piteous is not often used in this sense, it does occur: • In the club "library", a piteous collection of a couple of hundred dated, dog-eared Victorian popular editions —Benny Green, Punch, 27 Apr. 1976 |
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