'wretch' is a perfectly correct and usable word in written English.
It is used as a noun to describe a person in a pitiful or desperate state. For example, "The homeless man was a wretched sight, with dirt-caked clothes and a sorrowful face."
One poor wretch, pressed against the car window at a Delhi traffic light, tries to change a dollar bill she presumably cadged off a tourist.
However, being an inky-fingered wretch at heart, when printing he switches to 12-point Times New Roman, the godfather of many a modern font family, including Georgia.
Slumped below her is a wretch even closer to death: a skeletal soldier holding a cask, with a ballad—"The Downfall of Madam Gin"—peeking out of his basket.Behind this dismal pair are two orphan girls, wearing St Giles badges to show that they are nominally in the care of the parish, drinking by the gin barrels.
If only he had got his hands on one before bidding farewell to the trading floor to become an impoverished inky-fingered wretch instead.
So he did, storming back in 1994 as mayor for a fourth term, singing on election night "Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me!"There was never any shortage of knocking-down in his life, from which he would spring up every time like a prizefighter.
AFTER 35 years as an ink-stained wretch, your correspondent is used to the racket of printing presses.
And Italians call a hapless wretch a "poor Christ".
But at home some people said that the Great Fire of London in 1666, and an outbreak of bubonic plague a year earlier—Daniel Defoe's "Plague Year"—was God's way of punishing England for tolerating such an impious wretch.
In his diary Pepys recalls this humble beginning, when his young wife "used to make coal fires and wash my foul clothes with her own hand for me, poor wretch! in our little room at Lord Sandwich's; for which I ought forever to love and admire her, and do".
As dissident Manchester City fans spend this afternoon in the pub rather than at the Emirates, a poor wretch at the Premier League is doubtless devising a rebuttal strategy for anyone who dares to doubt the incipient generosity of the Attendance Working Group.
Franks, in particular, excels as the sozzled, potty-mouthed Karen, who's entangled in a toxic relationship with a wretch called Billy Paul Kayee).
