Literary notes about SCANTY (AI summary)
The term "scanty" is often employed to evoke a sense of insufficiency or sparseness across diverse contexts in literature. Authors use it to characterize meager provisions or inadequate sustenance, as when a character endures a poor diet in times of hardship ([1], [2], [3]). At the same time, "scanty" describes limited physical features or minimal resources, whether referring to sparse locks of hair or insufficient furniture ([4], [5], [6]). It also serves to emphasize weakness in information or material evidence, highlighting conditions in which data or relics are notably scarce ([7], [8], [9]). In each instance, the word deepens the atmosphere of deprivation while underlining the resilience or vulnerability of characters and settings alike.
- Several weeks elapsed, during which time, under the scanty diet to which I was subjected, I had partially recovered.
— from Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup - On the table lay a dozen peeled potatoes, and a small pot was boiling on the fire, to receive their scanty and only daily meal.
— from Roughing It in the Bush by Susanna Moodie - The former works hard, puts up with coarse, scanty fare, and submits, with a good grace, to hardships that would kill a domesticated animal at home.
— from Roughing It in the Bush by Susanna Moodie - The tramp bared his head with the scanty hair standing up like a brush on it, turned his eyes upward and crossed himself twice.
— from Project Gutenberg Compilation of Short Stories by Chekhov by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov - Levin could see the scanty locks wet with sweat on the temples and tense, transparent-looking forehead.
— from Anna Karenina by graf Leo Tolstoy - They are, in truth, scanty enough; but—” I interrupted— “My cottage is clean and weather-proof; my furniture sufficient and commodious.
— from Jane Eyre: An Autobiography by Charlotte Brontë - As our information about this district is extremely scanty, I have preferred to exclude it from the area of the Southern Massim.
— from Argonauts of the Western Pacific by Bronislaw Malinowski - I began with such scanty sources of information as were at my own disposal.
— from The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins - Even from this scanty specimen, I found it impossible to doubt the talent, or not to admire the ingenuity, of the author.
— from Biographia Literaria by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
