down-at-the-heel

They are a decidedly more down-at-the-heel bunch than the refugees and migrants who are taking the express route on buses and in taxis through Europe, often making it from Turkey to Germany in a week.

Steppenwolf will also mount productions of Conor McPherson’s play “The Night Alive,” about down-at-the-heel Dubliners, and David Adjmi’s satire “Marie Antoinette.”

Petty thieves, brawlers, peeping Toms - the daily calendar of down-at-the-heel, low-end crime - were all grist for the mill, as long as the perpetrators or the victims were from the neighborhood.

Its slightly down-at-the-heel quality was therefore an illusion, and a very private joke appreciated by a few.

He had a way, in the days of his power, of forgetting those who had befriended him when he was down-at-the-heel exile, and of snubbing former friends who were so foolish as to claim present notice on the ground of past favors.