The phrase "a pitiful one" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to describe something or someone that evokes pity or sympathy, often due to their unfortunate circumstances or condition.
Example: "After hearing his story, I realized that he was truly a pitiful one, struggling to make ends meet."
Alternatives: "a pathetic figure" or "a sorrowful individual."
If this roadmap to agree a global deal to tackle climate change by 2015, which would take force by 2020, is a triumph, it is a pitiful one.
He replies, "In some sort, sir: but though my case be a pitiful one, I hope I shall not be flayed out of it".
The tenant's lot is often a pitiful one.
Her story, when looked at objectively, is a rather pitiful one.
[The notion that the US is so poor that it faces ruin if it behaves responsibly is a really pitiful one.] View Article By Rivka Galchen By Jia Tolentino By Malcolm Gladwell By Zoë Heller.
One is what you might call the romantic-pathetic theory of imagination: any alternative reality that we design and furnish, when we conceive a work of art, is always to some extent a stand-in for the puny or pitiful one that we have been personally landed with.
"It was a pitiful spectacle," one correspondent wrote, "to see these girls tumble down after the finish like dead sparrows".
Selina strikes a note of defiance at the end of Let Them Call It Jazz, but here, too, the feeling arises that over time she might become just like another Martiniquaise in Rhys's fiction: the pitiful one we witness offering herself up to a stranger in Rhys's 1939 novel, Good Morning, Midnight, "'crying because she was at the end of everything'".
Sometimes, looking down at the pitiful one before him, the judge will be struck with an almost overwhelming sense of melancholy.
From looking pitiful one minute, "his eyes and face would swiftly twitch into wild vivacity and mirth".
If it weren't so ignorant and pitiful, one could mourn this collapse of dignity in service to an evil cause.
