rachitic

adj

1. Of or pertaining to, or affected by, rickets (“a disorder of infancy and early childhood due to a deficiency of vitamin D, causing soft or weak bones”).

   “Nor was there time to do much more than distribute some sweet to the pallid rachitic children.”

   “His companions—now I could see them as well. […] Tiny, nocturnal, twittering, they were like rachitic children, and as one went past me I saw mongoloid features and a bald head.”

   “They [the author's grandparents] brought Margot, who was a little more than a year old, back to Cataca with them, […] It was hard for me to get used to the change, because Margot came to the house like a creature from another life, rachitic and wild, and with an impenetrable interior world. When Abigaíl—the mother of Luis Carmelo Correa—saw her she could not understand why my grandparents had assumed the burden of that commitment. "The girl is dying," she said.”

2. (figuratively)In a precarious or weak condition; likely to break down or collapse; feeble, rickety.

   “On Dec. 2, we found ourselves rolling in the roads of pestilential Lagos, our lullaby the sullen distant roar, whilst a dusky white gleam smoking over the deadly bar in the darkening horizon threatened us with a disagreeable landing at the last, the youngest, and the most rachitic of Great Britain's large but now exceedingly neglected family of colonies.”

   “Gumbril Senior occupied a tall, narrow-shouldered and rachitic house in a little obscure square not far from Paddington. […] It was a prematurely old and decaying house in a decaying quarter.”

   “More important, if the daring financial gamble is won, it may encourage other European nations with overvalued, rachitic currencies, notably France and Greece, to push through their own tough financial programs.”

   “Even as he thought this he saw, leaping from the last stair of a rachitic escalator, down there, a blond girl in a blue dress, bright in the brown darkness.”