Languishing—that’s what the New York Times is calling the current malaise we, the privileged, are suffering from. Let’s see:
lan·guish verb [no object]
1 (of a person or other living thing) lose or lack vitality; grow weak or feeble: plants may appear to be languishing simply because they are dormant. • fail to make progress or be successful: foreign stocks are still languishing. • archaic pine with love or grief: she still languished after Richard. • archaic assume or display a sentimentally tender or melancholy expression or tone: when a visitor comes in, she smiles and languishes.
2 suffer from being forced to remain in an unpleasant place or situation: he has been languishing in jail since 1974. DERIVATIVES languisher noun ORIGIN Middle English (in the sense ‘become faint, feeble, or ill’): from Old French languiss-, lengthened stem of languir ‘languish’, from a variant of Latin languere, related to laxus ‘loose, lax’.
I want more so I tried the thesaurus:
languish verb
1 the plants languished and died: weaken, grow weak, deteriorate, decline, go into a decline; wither, droop, flag, wilt, fade, fail, waste away; informal go downhill. ANTONYMS thrive, flourish
2 the general is now languishing in prison: waste away, rot, decay, wither away, molder, be abandoned, be neglected, be forgotten, suffer; be disregarded, experience hardship.
3 archaic she still languished after Richard: pine for, yearn for, ache for, long for, sigh for, desire, want, hanker after, carry a torch for; grieve for, mourn, miss; literary repine.
Lots of good words up there, especially the ones in the thesaurus.
Permit me a tangent. (You who know me already are aware that I am a tangential thinker. ) This aside might be useful to any of you who may have an essay/article assignment with no idea of what to do about it. My point is, and I do have one…
I would look at the assignment, write down the key word or words and even though I knew the words I would look them up and check the thesaurus for their synonyms and antonyms. Usually one or two of these other words would give me the outline of the essay, point by point. Then I’d check my text, i.e. the book I was supposed to be analyzing for my assignment, and find illustrations of the behaviour my words best exemplified. Then I would write my essay. After I turned it in, I’d read the analysis of the work by one or two critics.
I did this because my brother had told me I couldn’t think, all I had was a good memory. So I tried to think, and it worked. I have taught many other people this simple approach, including my son John, who has a PhD in physics (quantum math) and who can write an English essay, because of me, he says.
Check out John McPhee for a similar use of a dictionary and thesaurus—plus more. In Draft Number Four: On the Writing Process (2018) he shares writing tips and instruction with marvelous examples.
I think you will find this a useful tangent.