All 4 Uses

pathetic
in
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
(Auto-generated)

GEORGE (To NICK): Let her go. (MARTHA slumps to the floor in a sitting position) She'll be all right now.
MARTHA (Pathetic): No; no, he is not dead; he is not dead.
Act 3 *

pathetic = pitiful (arousing pity)
MARTHA (Pathetically) Yes.†
Act 3
MARTHA: I have tried, oh, God, I have tried; the one thing ....the one thing I've tried to carry pure and unscathed through the sewer of this marriage; through the sick nights, and the pathetic, stupid days, through the derision and the laughter ....God, the laughter, through one failure after another, one failure compounding another failure, each attempt more sickening, more numbing than the one before; the one thing, the one person I have tried to protect, to raise above the mire of this vile, crushing marriage; the one light in all this hopeless ....darkness ....our SON.†
Act 3
(MARTHA slumps to the floor in a sitting position) She'll be all right now MARTHA (Pathetic) No; no, he is not dead; he is not dead†
Act 3

Definitions:

(1) (pathetic as in: Her pathetic look saddened us.)
pitiful (arousing pity)
(2) (pathetic as in: a pathetic attempt to insult me)
very bad -- possibly so bad it is laughable (possibly mixed with some feeling of pity)
(3) (meaning too rare to warrant focus)
Much more rarely, and typically just in classic literature, pathetic can mean "relating to emotions". One fairly modern example is in the book, A Separate Peace, where the expression pathetic fallacy is used to describe the non-rational human tendency to ascribe human emotions to inanimate objects or animals.