Was Gordon Brown telling the truth about the pitiable exploitation of his newborn child, or was Rebekah Brooks?
And a subplot about a pitiable Haitian refugee and her children is no laughing matter.
Nothing could be more cliched, or more questionable, than the idea that ambitious career women without children must therefore be pitiable, emotionally empty figures – and Toni Erdmann does come close to this old chestnut.
Sometimes, driving past the prostitutes along the park road, he feels a thrilled apprehension at the idea that he might see her among them, though these pitiable girls are very young, almost children, and far prettier than Caterina.
Only the lush backdrop of Oriental carpets and wood paneling and an occasional verbal incongruity ("We are fighting for liquidity") clashed with Mrs. Lay's message that she and her husband and children were also deceived, pitiable victims of Enron's collapse.
Even today it is not known precisely how many children lived in these pitiable conditions – proper records were not kept – but estimates suggest 100,000.
For now and then it happened that some Syracusan triremes would be destroyed along the walls and their crews slain before the eyes of their kinsmen, and parents would witness the destruction of their children, sisters and wives the pitiable ends of husbands and brothers.
Martin is an abstraction, the embodiment of an occult principle of cosmic vengeance, and Mr. Keoghan makes him appropriately menacing and also pitiable, since he's also a grieving, needy child.
In a damning finding, she said that that one of the "most disturbing things" revealed in the abusive text message exchanges between them "was that the mother repeatedly sought to ingratiate herself with the father in a pitiable and wretched way at the expense of her children".
The sight of the American parent trying to convince a child that not every restaurant serves hamburger is a pitiable one.
Instead of the glowing warmth of a drawing room filled with well-dressed guests and well-mannered children, the first-act Christmas party offers the pitiable orphans exulting over their twig of a Christmas tree and hand-me-down presents as they are visited by the orphanage governors, only to have the gifts taken away after the guests have departed.
