Nearly one-third of the gap between the U.S. and the other countries, when it comes to the percentage of women who work, can be traced to the United States' pitiful work-family policies, says this 2013 study from two researchers at Cornell University.
Nothing in their pitiful lives works out until they are bitten by a spider, or start sporting a remarkable piece of jewellery, or are handed a large, seemingly radioactive hammer by their father.
It turns out that having to supplement your pitiful income working in a call centre or as a cleaner is not the pay-off that my colleagues were expecting after years of investing in their education.
He shares his wilful ignoring of reality ("A man way out in there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine") with the 1920s hucksters, but his story is post-1929, scrabbling for pitiful chances of work so as not to lose his home and self-respect, and hung up on the memory – or dream?
Writers recalled the hard work, pitiful wages, and grim poverty of life in the Swedish countryside.
Eighty per cent of the world's bestselling toys are manufactured in Chinese sweatshops by workers on pitiful wages, often working seven days a week.
Edmund Burke in the 18th century took exception to what he regarded as the cant phrase of "the labouring poor", because it suggested resistance to their fate by those who were born to work, however pitiful their reward.
When Debbie's pitiful lie doesn't work, she takes the same tactic I'll just bet she takes with her pupils; she gets good and mad.
Even more pitiful, the junta seems to work at cross purposes with itself.
He stayed for a while in the tin mines of Bolivia, outraged when he matched the price of tin on the world market against the working conditions and pitiful wages of Bolivian miners.
