The word 可悲 is formed by directly combining two conceptual building blocks: the character 可, which carries a sense of "worthy of" or "eliciting", with the character 悲, which represents the core concept of "sorrow" or "grief". It is not merely "sorrow" but a specific kind, sorrow that is deemed deserving, inevitable, or objectively pitiable. The formation fuses an evaluative judgment with an emotional state to create a single, condensed notion of something that is tragically sad or lamentable.