>>May be close. Though, judging by the dictionary, isn't that a bit strong? It seems to imply "great suffering due to adversity", and not necessarily from a disease.
>>
>>And you may have noticed it's not a noun.
>
>We have a lot of "nouns" like this that comprise an adjective: "the poor", "Bring me your hungry and dispossessed" (although these are collective "adjnountives"), that famouse Clint Eastward film: "The Beguiled"?, etc.

That still doesn't make them nouns. It's just the usage of adjectives as subjects in the sentence. Unless English grammar immediately promotes them into nouns when used so - in other languages I know of, an adjective can serve such a duty without changing its identity.

>>But then, what's the big deal? It's not that you're the word warehouse keeper and there's something missing in the inventory that they'd take off your salary. Not that anyone would blame you for not having something that never was there in the first place (or any other place).
>
>Whereas Dragan, in the Serbian department would be getting bonuses and exhibiting a surplus. They'd suspect you of having your hand in my till.

Actually guilty of the opposite. I'm forgetting some really good words. My circle of Serbian-speaking people is very limited, as you can imagine - immediate family, and a few friends online, plus the newspapers online. But the written language can't be as rich as the spoken; people simply have a different mind when they write. So I'm losing it bit by bit. When I get rich enough, I may start buying books from there, just to get some of it back.