Hardship & Decline — C1 English Vocabulary

Using hardship & decline words in English

Vocabulary for difficulty is graded by scale and by whether the difficulty is external or internal. The most useful distinction here is between a predicament, which is a situation you are in, and a quandary, which is a state of not knowing what to do about it. The page also notes that demise literally means death, and is used far more loosely than its meaning warrants.

What to watch out for

• Predicament is the situation; quandary is the indecision

  A predicament is an unpleasant and difficult situation that is hard to escape: a financial predicament. A quandary is the mental state of being unable to decide between options: in a quandary about whether to accept. One is outside you and the other is inside. A plight is close to a predicament and adds a note of sympathy, which is why journalism uses it for refugees and the vulnerable.

• Demise means death

  Strictly, demise means a person’s death, and it is formal: following his demise. Its extension to organisations and ideas — the demise of the high street — is now standard, but using it merely to mean decline understates its force. If something is still going but weakening, the word is decline, deterioration or degeneration.

• The scale of disaster

  Adversity is difficulty in general and is uncountable: resilience in the face of adversity. An ordeal is a prolonged painful experience. Tribulation is literary and usually plural: trials and tribulations. At the top of the scale, calamity, catastrophe and devastation describe events of a different order, and using them for a missed train is the kind of overstatement that weakens writing.

Words learners mix up

Three clusters organise this list: the many ways something can fall apart, the adjectives that grade how hard an experience was, and the verbs for a person or institution that is failing slowly rather than suddenly.

Collocations that sound natural

Several of these words live almost entirely inside fixed phrases, and using them outside those phrases is the giveaway. These are the frames journalism and formal writing actually use.

• adversity

  in the face of adversityovercome adversitytriumph over adversity

  Uncountable, and it appears far more often in these three frames than anywhere else. In the face of adversity is close to a cliché, which is a reason to earn it with a specific example.

• plight

  the plight ofdraw attention to the plighta desperate plight

  Takes of plus the sufferers. The word invites sympathy, so it commits you to a position — a neutral report would say situation.

• dire

  dire consequencesdire straitsin dire need ofa dire warning

  Attributive in nearly every use, and dire straits is fixed and always plural. Colloquial British English has a second sense of simply very bad — the food was dire — which is much lighter.

• endure

  endure hardshipendure for centuriesan enduring legacy

  Two senses in one verb: to suffer something patiently, and to last. The participle enduring almost always carries the second, positive sense, which is why an enduring friendship is a compliment.

• weather

  weather the stormweather the crisisweathered the recession

  As a verb it means to come through something difficult without being destroyed. Weather the storm is the base idiom, and it extends comfortably to any crisis.

• slump

  a slump in salesslump into a chairan economic slump

  Noun and verb, and the physical sense of dropping heavily is what gives the economic one its force. It takes in for what has fallen.

See the full C1 collocations list →

Formal, neutral or informal?

Words for suffering carry obligations. Some are clinical, some are literary, and a few are so strong that using them casually costs a writer credibility on everything else.

• demiseFormal · euphemisticA person’s death, in formal or legal language. Its extension to institutions is standard, but it remains a strong word — using it for something merely in decline is an overstatement a careful reader will notice.
• tribulationLiterary · biblicalGreat suffering, usually plural and usually in the phrase trials and tribulations, where it has become half-humorous. Serious use of the singular sounds scriptural.
• woeLiterary or jocularGrief and misfortune. Genuinely archaic in the singular — a tale of woe — while the plural has become light: the country’s economic woes is standard newspaper English.
• impoverishedFormal · preferred to "poor"Made poor, and the participle matters: it implies something was done to the person or place. Journalism prefers it to poor partly for that reason and partly because it sounds less blunt.
• wretchedStrong · pitying or irritatedIn miserable condition, deserving pity. It has a second, entirely British colloquial use as a mild curse — this wretched printer — which sits oddly beside the first.
• privationFormal · historical flavourLack of the basic necessities of life. Formal and slightly old-fashioned, at home in historical writing where a modern report would say deprivation or name what was missing.
• comeuppanceInformal · satisfiedA deserved punishment, and the word carries the speaker’s approval of it. Conversational and narrative, so it belongs in storytelling rather than in analysis.
• stoicismApproving · philosophical originEndurance without complaint. Lowercase for the character trait, capitalised for the ancient school of philosophy — and the everyday sense has drifted a long way from what the Stoics actually taught.

Sentences to try

Four frames about difficulty. Check whether the word matches the actual scale.

• The company found itself in a serious financial predicament.
• She was in a genuine quandary about which offer to take.
• The report documents the steady deterioration of the building.
• The flood left devastation across three counties.

Questions about hardship & decline vocabulary