Disdainful pity...?

Question

My question stems from a conversation on sympathy and pity.

My girlfriend and I agreed that sympathy is feeling for someone, but without taking action or desiring to take action. Pity, then, overlaps with sympathy except there's a desire to take action to help the person in need. But pity, can also be more cynical, and it can demean, intentionally or otherwise, the person receiving pity.

So, this is where I'm curious, is there a word that means specifically disdainful or demeaning pity?

Answer 1

The word you are actually looking for is (drumbeats) pity.

The word pity, of late, has become associated with being condescending. When you take pity on a person, you implicitly regard him as inferior and feckless. The words sympathy and compassion, on the other hand, do not have such negativity attached to them.

References:

• "Pity has the dynamic that the one to whom it is shown is considered not only in a worse situation than the one who shows pity, but also considered inferior." (Newint)
• Wikipedia
• In English, people have started to avoid the word pity, because it has come to have associations of superiority. (See the note in this link.)

Answer 2

You could be looking for a word like contempt in the sense of 'looking-down' at someone (disdain, as you say).

Though this is not the same as 'pity', it is 'pity' itself that has acquired such connotations of disdain of late.