Pathetic in everyday English means feeble to the point of being contemptible. A pathetic excuse, a pathetic attempt, that is pathetic.
That is nearly always a criticism, and a scornful one. But the older and literary sense is quite different and carries no scorn at all: pathetic means arousing pity — a pathetic sight, the pathetic figure at the gate. In criticism, the pathetic fallacy is the technique of giving human feelings to nature, as in an angry sky. A learner should recognise both, and expect the scornful one in speech and the pitying one in books.
1adjectivefeebleSo feeble or inadequate that it deserves contempt.
“It was a pathetic effort and everybody said so.”
synonyms: feeble, useless, lamentable
2adjectivepatheticArousing pity.
“The dog made a pathetic noise at the door.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
pathetic is a quality of feebleness or pity.
Also accepted in games: pitiful
Greek pathetikos meant liable to feeling, from pathos, suffering — the same root as sympathy, apathy and patient. The word began as being about feeling and slid into being about deserving pity and then into deserving contempt, which is a bleak little journey.
Ancient Greek
παθητικός — subject to feeling, capable of feeling, impassioned
Latin
patheticus
Middle French
pathétique
English, today
pathetic
Built from
From Middle French pathétique, from Latin patheticus, from Ancient Greek παθητικός (“subject to feeling, capable of feeling, impassioned”), from παθητός (“one who has suffered, subject to suffering”), from πάσχω (“to suffer”). by surface analysis, path- + -etic.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA