penurious

What might be extravagant to-day, might in half a century become penurious and inadequate.

It was too far to return to dinner, and an allowance of cold meat and bread, in the same penurious proportion observed in our ordinary meals, was served round between the services.

It was a comfortable room, at once snug and handsome; the bright grate was filled with a genuine shire fire, red, clear, and generous, no penurious South-of-England embers heaped in the corner of a grate.

Everybody was very penurious for weeks beforehand and hoards were counted scrutinizingly every day.

'though I tell you what--and this is a circumstance worth bearing in mind as showing how the sharpest among us may be taken in sometimes--I was so deceived by the penurious way in which you lived, alone with Nelly--'

You know ensigns--their blood is boiling water, their circumstances generally penurious. Well, I had a servant Nikifor who used to do everything for me in my quarters, economized and managed for me, and even laid hands on anything he could find (belonging to other people), in order to augment our household goods; but a faithful, honest fellow all the same.

Also in their penurious, laborious character; the individual only satisfies his necessary appetites, and confines his expenditure to them; his other desires he subdues, under the idea that they are unprofitable.

Each State is the constituent and enacting party, and the United States in Congress assembled the recipient of delegated power--and that power delegated with such a penurious and carking hand that it had more the aspect of a revocation of the Declaration of Independence than an instrument to carry it into effect.

In their housekeeping they were penurious in the extreme.

I trust that the labour and hazard of an investigation - of which the smallest results have been slowly pieced together, in the pressure of arduous avocations, under grinding penurious apprehensions, at rise of morn, at dewy eve, in the shadows of night, under the watchful eye of one whom it were superfluous to call Demon - combined with the struggle of parental Poverty to turn it, when completed, to the right account, may be as the sprinkling of a few drops of sweet water on my funeral pyre.

At its worst, however, this retooling leaves future retirees vulnerable to the very outcome the system was meant to prevent, a penurious old age, while it shamefully deposits an additional burden of as much as $5 trillion onto our children and grandchildren.

A report has revealed, not too surprisingly it must be said, that the likes of Kelly Holmes and Amir Khan - transformed near-enough overnight into made-for-life superstars - are very much the exceptions that prove the penurious rule.