WordWealth: inanition

in·a·ni·tion , n.

It's analogous to Association Football. Britain has the most elaborate and fiercely competitive league system in the world. It takes the announcer a quarter of an hour to trawl through the results at five o'clock on Saturday. And yet we can't beat Portugal. The problem that faces British universities is not that they have become fat and lazy, but that they have been starved beyond lean efficiency into inanition. —— John Sutherland; A Contest that No One Can Really Win; The Guardian, August 14, 2000

Even without, or before, revolution or foreign invasion, states can decline of their own inanition. —— Harold Perkin, "The rise and fall of empires: the role of surplus extraction," History Today, April 2002

Sadly, though not surprisingly, convention speeches designed to rouse voters from their indifference only exacerbate the country's inanition. —— Thomas J. Mccarthy; This Year's National Party Meetings Displayed Poll-Itics As Usual; America; Sept 9, 2000

More than its Dracula connection, Sighisoara's renown as a trove of medieval architecture drew me there: its elevated old town (known as the Cetate, or "Citadel") is ranked as one of Eastern Europe's most stunning sights. But once there, I lost my appetite for sightseeing: Sighisoara then was a bare-bulb freezer of despair and creeping inanition. Romanians were suffering under Ceausescu's debt-reduction austerity plan, shivering to death in almost unheated apartments, wasting away on food rations that barely sustained life. The "Genius of the Carpathians" and his ruinous misrule were desiccating the beauty of Tepes's birthplace. —— Jeffrey Tayler; Transylvania Today; The Atlantic; June 1997

—Note: Inanition derives from Latin inanitio, "emptiness," from inanire, "to make empty," from inanis, "empty." It is related to inane, "lacking sense or intelligence; pointless."