‘Pity’ is a curious term. Along with its attendant adjectives, ‘pitiful’, ‘pitiable’ and (now to a much lesser extent) ‘piteous’, it is in common usage; indeed, it is a word we come across all the time. Yet its usage is fraught with difficulty. It is, of course, accepted that we can use it in relation to third parties: we may say that we pity the homeless, the destitute, the chronically ill, the disadvantaged; indeed, we may often act on an assumed basis of pity – by giving to charity, for example, by engaging in voluntary work, by calling attention to those less privileged, in one way or another, than ourselves. But if we were to use it directly, in the formulation ‘I pity you’, then the valency, the emphasis of the term would shift dramatically. We might be accused, for example, of condescension, of being patronising, of extending rather than ameliorating a position of privilege.

And if we were to go further – or perhaps in a different direction – and say (or perhaps even think) ‘I pity myself’, then we might feel that we were at best abandoning some rule of emotional decorum, at worst that we were committing a sin, perhaps second only to the dread sin of despair. Self-pity is, it would appear, a largely unacceptable emotion; pity has to be directed outwards. And in thus being directed outwards, then we might say that it falls into place amid a range of other similar terms: ‘compassion’, ‘sympathy’, ‘empathy’ might be the most obvious ones.