The phrase "pathetic fate" is correct and can be used in written English.
It is usually used to describe a sad or unfortunate destiny or outcome for someone or something. Here is an example sentence: "After months of hard work and dedication, the project was ultimately abandoned due to budget cuts - a truly pathetic fate for such a promising endeavor."
Occasionally, he is forced into personal comment, as on the pathetic fate of the virtuous and much-liked Athenian Nicias.
Whenever the Palestinians have resisted that pathetic fate (as any nation would), Israel has punished them for their insolence.
Bipartisanship is equally extinct — as made all too evident this month by the pathetic fate of the much-hyped Simpson-Bowles deficit commission.
"Gnostics often use the terms 'drink' or 'drunkenness' to depict the pathetic fate of the entrapped spirit, but we don't take that literally.
None of this - from the curious fate of poor Nick Brown, demoted but still apparently able to perch on a stool just inside the Cabinet door, to the pathetic fate of John Prescott, an engine driver without an engine - bodes well.
Following the chain of thoughts the mishap evokes, he writes instead about his childhood in Canton, Ohio; and his relation to his horse, Betha, whose twice scarred body and pathetic fate as a marching horse contrast with her former sense of life and grace.
There were probably few of them, their fate pathetic.
The sets by Klara Zieglerova -- particularly a waiting room outside the jurors' chamber dominated by enormous silver doors rising against a celestially themed backdrop -- and the costumes by Amela Baksic, which drape the characters in flawlessly tasteful fashion, contribute to the sense that design is a pathetic hedge against fate and human nature.
In the second part, Lessing remembers what really happened — she grew up in Rhodesia, the daughter of a wounded veteran with a mind "full of horrors" and a mother doomed to the fate of those "pathetic demented women" who give up their lives for their families.
In the second part, Lessing remembers what really happened she grew up in Rhodesia, the daughter of a wounded veteran with a mind "full of horrors" and a mother doomed to the fate of those "pathetic demented women" who give up their lives for their families.
(He has also, somehow, come out married, and with children -- not the fate usually reserved for the pathetic romantic protagonist, whether in Proust or Stendhal).
