Tuesday, 25 November 2025

New to me

 

New to me

Immiserate: impoverish, make miserable

This verb appeared around 1956, but the noun, immiseration, came into use in the 1940s.

 According to ‘The Times, the chancellor immiserated business by overstressing her point about the catastrophic economic legacy left by the Tories. After that, she impoverished business, using her first budget to raise employers’ national insurance contributions (NICs) by 1.2 per cent, damaging the retail sector in particular.

I suspect many of us are ‘immiserated’ on a daily basis, but at least we can commiserate with each other.

30 comments:

  1. I am certainly made miserable often enough, but immiserated is a word I haven't heard before. Now I will :)

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  2. One wonders where you find these words with an odd meaning. Keep it up . It's fun.

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    1. They seem to leap off the page at me . . .

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  3. I am immiserated to the hilt right now with vertigo. Sigh...

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    1. You're still suffering, Kay? That's a long time. I hope you find a cure soon.

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  4. I have heard of impoverished, but not the others. I am not miserable very often.

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  5. New to me. Clever use of commiserate.

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  6. These wonderful words are brilliant. Thanks 😊

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    1. The Times can be a good source of . . . news . . . the proofreading is pretty rettiboe thgh.

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  7. New to me too and I don't think I'm likely to use that word - no one would know what I meant!

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    1. That's half the fun of using unusual words . . .

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  8. A word that carries its meaning well.

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  9. never heard this word, noun or verb but I can attest to the fact that bobs health issues are Immiserating us for sure. we are both miserable and impoverished. this could fit any and all things.

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  10. I've never heard this word. I'm pretty sure there were things that made me feel immiserated

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    1. I'm immiserated daily by some of the nonsense that goes on in the world.

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  11. I'm laughing but then maybe I really shouldn't be.

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    1. Oh, you should - laughter makes the world go round. 😁

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  12. Languages change, I stated that when the German we used to speak in the 60th has changed a lot, fortunately I understand English there are so many English words which "moved" in. And the youth has a own language, but that in all countries. My German friend bought me a dictionary of the German youth expressions to the German I spoke ! If you live in the country you don't realize it so much.

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    1. You're right - language changes and evolves. I don't know what popular expressions there are now. I shall have to look . . .

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  13. Until reading your post, I had not come across this term. And fortunately, I have (so far) not been immiserated; quite the contrary. When I was younger, I worked very hard for very little money, and because I paid all the fees out of my own pocket, my divorce was quite immiserating. Things changed for the better with my second marriage, and then improved greatly in recent years. Although I am not rich by most people's standards, I am not worried about paying my bills and the mortgage, and can afford nice holidays, clothes, eating out and so on. Is that called demiseration then? Or simply improvement?

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    1. I like 'demiseration' - it has a nice ring to it, though sadly it is not a recognised word yet. I'm confident that if people started using it, it would become popular.

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  14. New to me too
    Alison in Devon x

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