languish

languish [ˈlæŋgwɪʃ] v. i.

1.) Of living beings (also of plants or vegetation): to grow weak, faint, or feeble: to lose health, have one's vitality impaired; to continue in a state of feebleness and suffering. To live under conditions which lower the vitality or depress the spirits. In early use, often: to be sick (construed with of).
2.) Of appetites or activities: to grow slack, lose vigour or intensity. Of light, colour, sound, etc.: to become faint. Of health: to fall off
3.) To droop in spirits; to pine with love, grief, or the like. To waste away with desire or longing for, to pine for. Also construed with infinitive. To assume a languid look or expression, as an indication of sorrowful or tender emotion. Also quasi-trans.
4.) quasi-trans. (usually with out): To pass (a period of time) in languishing (O.E.D. 2nd Ed.).

Etymology: Middle English languishen, from Old French languir, languiss, from Latin languere, to be languid.

"Well, Jon, as a journalist I have to maintain my objectivity, but I would say the feeling down here was one of a pervasive and a palpable evil, a thick demonic stench that rolls over you and clings like hot black tar, a nightmare from which you cannot awaken, a nameless fear that lives in the dark spaces beyond your peripheral vision and drives you towards inhuman cruelties and unspeakable perversions; the delegates' bloated pustulant bodies twisting from one obscene form to another: giant spider-shapes and ravenous wolf-headed creatures who feast on the flesh of the innocent and suck the marrow from the bones of the poor, and all of them driven like goats to the slaughter by their infernal masters on the podium, known by many names: Beelzebub, Baʿal Zebul, Mammon, Abaddon, Theritus (sic.), Asmodeus, Satan, Lucifer, Nick, Old Scratch, The Ancient Enemy, and He Who Must Not Be Named. This is Hell, Jon, where the damned languish forever in a black flame that gives no heat, sheds no light, yet consumes the flesh forever and will not go out. Jon?" (The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, Ben Karlin (head writer), August 4th 2000).

("Illustration for Paradise Lost by John Milton", Gustave Doré, 1866)