Word: scant
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...call was the kind that every TV news director dreads: a despondent person demanding the attention of a camera, and an audience, for one last desperate act. On scant notice and even scanter knowledge, the TV executive must decide whether the threat is news to be covered, or a cruel, senseless display that the cameras will only encourage. The voice on the telephone said, "If you want to see somebody set himself on fire, be at the square in Jacksonville in ten minutes...
Occasionally Safire is guilty of a more serious offense, in the view of the Times. Says Editor Rosenthal: "Sometimes he goes too far on innuendo, even for a columnist." For example, on very scant evidence, Safire has unfairly suggested that Senator John Glenn is anti-Israel. He couples such impetuousness with a merry disregard for consistency. He quotes with self-satisfaction a line from Walt Whitman's Song of Myself: "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself...
...must perform should be clearly defined and dictated by real needs rather than an infatuation with advanced technology. Whether a weapon can be afforded in adequate numbers should be a more important concern than whether it is state-of-the-art; all the latest bells and whistles will do scant good if a weapon is overwhelmed by superior numbers...
...fraternal feeling. "Screw 'em," he says, "and you can quote me." The President is far more politic but knows that his zealous conservative constituents need him more than he needs them. The 1982 elections, in which the National Conservative Political Action Committee spent $4.5 million but had scant influence, produced a moderate Congress. To govern, Reagan must deal with Congress, not with the right. "We're not such a great majority in the world," he told the conservative magazine Human Events last week, "that we can be giving ourselves political saliva tests all the time...
...Vanity Fair is eccentric. It has not found its personality. A profusion of thick dividing lines and varying column widths fight to keep a reader's attention from straying to the words. The writing often reflects a lack of firm editing. Short reviews offer mostly glib opinion with scant analysis; the writers, moreover, apparently believe that if one metaphor per sentence is good, several are better, even if contradictory. A rambling rumination on "an American loss of nerve" by former New York Times Critic John Leonard has, aptly, a running leitmotiv of Japanese fog. In other articles, the language...