'how pitiful' is a correct and usable phrase in written English.
You can use it when you want to express sadness or pity for someone or something. For example: "I heard that the homeless shelter had to close due to lack of funding. How pitiful."
On harsher inspection, "I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and succeeded – and how pitiful that was".
How funny that someone thought to preserve them; how pitiful that they've come to symbolise all that Carpenter stood for.
"If we arrest, we open ourselves to a lawsuit," said Sergeant Dave Morgenstern, of the Sanford Police Department, presumably unaware of how pitiful (and pitiless) that sounded.
Meanwhile, natural disasters in America don't lead to big public spending increases — look at how pitiful the aid post-Katrina was.
In the five years since the financial crisis took hold, people have been sucking it in by the lungful and discovering how pitiful a coping strategy that is.
The players laughed at the absurdity of the streak, which had reached 56 games dating to last July 25-26, and Francoeur later related that Barajas jokingly declared, in a coarse way, just how pitiful the Mets were that year.
It's pitiful how little she knows of sex and contraception, the details of which she procures from her toxic pal, Nockie.
It was a piece of free verse that appeared to draw its influence from an obscure branch of the Beat school: Haunted by a sunbrown peasant girl bursting with life you, the one shopping for shoes it's pitiful how I beg on your sidewalk for some spare change of affection.
There was something pitiful in how cool they were.
I spread my sleeping bag under a rock overhang and passed most of my time swatting mosquitoes and filling my journal with increasingly pitiful complaints about how bored and, especially, how hungry I was.
The booklet is a pitiful reminder of how little political leaders have done to protect citizens from the nation's raging gun culture.
