The word 'wretches' is grammatically correct and can be used in written English.
It is typically used as a plural noun to describe a group of miserable or unfortunate people. Example: The wretches crowded around the food bank, desperate for any scraps they could get their hands on.
All the important choices, including whether a mouse should have one button or two, had been made for them, whereas the poor wretches who had to use a PC had, like the Calvinists of yore, to make their own salvation: installing expansion cards, anti-virus software, wrestling with incompatible peripherals and so on.
It also makes drugs more dangerous: addicts buy heavily adulterated cocaine and heroin; many use dirty needles to inject themselves, spreading HIV; the wretches who succumb to "crack" or "meth" are outside the law, with only their pushers to "treat" them.
There is no denying, though, that the superfluity could have been better handled, and that the poor freezing wretches immobilised outside deserved better.Inside, temperature and stasis are not a problem; things are simply slower.
"What a sad time it is to see no boats upon the River; and grass grows all up and down White Hall court, and nobody but poor wretches in the streets!" Those who died included Pepys's physician, his schoolfellow, his aunt, and the entire family of "poor Will, that use to sell us ale at Westminster Hall-door".
Long shelled, shot at and deprived of shelter, food and medicine, the half-starved wretches who have survived the recent battles are exceptionally vulnerable.
WHEN a party dominated by dalits those former wretches known as "untouchables"—swept to power in Uttar Pradesh (UP) on May 11th, the lamentable performance of India's ruling Congress party made headlines.
When the town refused to surrender, he stormed it and put the garrison of 3,000 to the sword, acting both as the avenger of the massacres of 1641 ("I am persuaded that this is a righteous judgement of God upon those barbarous wretches who have imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood") and as a deliberate instrument of terror to induce others to surrender.
Jacobi's prayer for naked wretches "who bide the pelting of this pitiless storm" is very moving.
There's a tinge of sadness about the poor wretches who are in contention because among them is Lennie Ingram, a good footballer and cricketer in his day, who didn't take up golf until six years ago, aged 61 and already suffering from rheumatoid arthritis.
The great momentum of his performance is to feel what wretches feel.
Let the "brave" jihadi soldiers lining up to replace the miserable wretches turned to dust by the French military watch as arms are joined around Wembley Stadium, two nations speaking in a different tongue coming together to show what kind of life is possible when freedom and tolerance lie at the heart of the piece.
