"a certain wish" is a correct and usable phrase in written English.
You can use it when you want to refer to a wish or desire that is specific and known by the speaker or writer. For example, "I had a certain wish to go on a cruise before I retired, and I'm glad I was able to make it happen."
Staff found it very challenging when a resident was able to clearly articulate certain wishes such as no CPR, but lacked capacity to make decisions around assisted feeding or palliative care versus intensive care.
"In a certain way I wish to say that Obama's conduct was correct.
That's something I came to at a certain point; I wish I'd come to it younger.
Absent more specifics, the statement requires a certain amount of wishing upon a star.
She has to in her line of work: the snaring of celebrities and royals for the pages of Hello! magazine, pornography for a certain caste that wishes it could reliably pronounce the word "Gstaad".
To a certain extent, Hardy's wish was granted: his heart was cut out before his cremation and buried without fanfare in the country churchyard, while in London eminent pall-bearers like Stanley Baldwin, A. E. Housman, George Bernard Shaw, Rudyard Kipling and Edmund Gosse carried the coffin, draped in white satin, while crowds waited outside the abbey in the pouring rain.
Yet as Elisabeth puts Sahara through her paces -- the most excruciating of these, for me anyway, is when she puts on Bette Midler's anthem "Wind Beneath My Wings" and has Sahara sing and dance along to it -- it's hard not to think there's a certain amount of narcissistic wish fulfillment going on here.
We now assume that we are given a certain u vector and wish to calculate the fluxomers in our system.
Even where nurses and patients expressed concern about the stigma of separate HIV services, there was a certain tension with the wish to be seen by nurses with expertise and with whom they were familiar.
