miserably poor

His family was miserably poor.

It is a question articulated precisely by Stephen Hawking last year, when he noted: “Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution.”

Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution.

At the Met on Thursday, he so completely inhabited the role — that of a delusional, miserably poor soldier living in a German garrison town around 1830 — and so dominated the stage, that you would have thought that he had spent weeks rehearsing in this stark, gripping production by Mark Lamos, with minimal props, black walls, looming shadows and blotches of bloody reds.

Life was not easy for nuns who might at any moment have to flee before a raid and whose lands were constantly being ravaged; they grew more and more miserably poor and as usual poverty seemed to go hand in hand with laxity.