wretch

   This word is now rather old-fashioned, but it came easily to speakers in former times who wished to abuse someone. It was in regular use from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century, with the meaning of ‘vile person’, and was either insulting enough on its own or was strengthened by the addition of ‘damned’, ‘vile’, ‘inhuman’, ‘dishonest’, or some such word.

   Occasionally it is found as ‘poor wretch’, where the meaning is rather different. The typical poor wretch has suffered deep misfortune and is to be pitied for his unhappiness. Examples of both usages abound in literature before the twentieth century. In Shakespeare’s King John, one of many of his plays where the word occurs vocatively, ‘thou wretch’ is equated with ‘thou slave, thou coward’.

   In Dandelion Days, by Henry Williamson, which deals with school life in the early part of the twentieth century, a schoolmaster uses ‘you depraved wretch’ to a boy, but the speaker’s use of language is rather archaic. Elsewhere the same master uses ‘witless wretch’. Like Any Other Man, by Patrick Boyle, has an Irish woman saying to her lover: ‘Good morning, wretch. No need to ask did you sleep well.’ In James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus says to another young man: ‘That was the first definition I gave you, you sleepyheaded wretch.’