Word: scantness
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...poverty. The sensations of being poor are scarcely comprehensible to the 170 million Americans who are not poor: the hollow-bellied, hand-to-mouth feeling of having no money for tomorrow; the smell of wood smoke that hangs over Southern shantytowns?romantic to the suburbanite, but symptomatic of scant heat and pinchgut rations to the poor; the bags of flour delivered by a well-meaning welfare agency, in a household that has no oven; the pervasive odor of human urine and rat droppings in perennially damp walk-ups; the bite of wind or snow through a wall of rotten bricks...
...Suburbs Black poverty is most evident in the crumbling cores of Northern and Western cities. Walter Pollard, 64, came up from Winston-Salem, N.C., to Harlem in search of a "good job." Today he lives just over the poverty line?$150 a month as a janitor keeps him a scant penny above the $1,710 poverty line for a single man in an urban area. Short (5 ft. 6 in.) and lean in his baggy denim trousers, woolen work jacket and purple longshoreman's cap, he used to support a wife and five children. He and his wife were divorced...
...then, he has returned repeatedly, both as a knockabout traveler and a rich tourist. In his book he makes no effort to prettify the country's problems or ignore its faults. As long as Spain remains ruled by the army, the landed families and the church, he sees scant hope of any dramatic social or industrial progress-although he does grant that there have been genuine advances in recent years. He is acerbic about the humiliating political strictures imposed by the Franco government, deplores the abrasive, remorseless poverty that makes even the dogs in the provinces scrawny and unlovable...
...such bestselling staples as roast beef, chicken and fried shrimp, specifications for which are detailed in a six-inch-thick recipe book called "the Bible." With an IBM computer keeping close tabs on supplies and customer preferences, Morrison's holds losses from spoilage and leftovers to a scant 2%. Similar precision governs food display: on the serving line, such higher-profit extras as shrimp cocktail and strawberry shortcake always come first, on the theory that hungry customers are most apt to buy them before they get their meat and potatoes...
There are now nearly 20,000 fedayeen in Jordan v. scant hundred or so before the war-and their ranks are swelling daily. Whereas all guerrilla operations used to be controlled by the disreputable (and now discredited) Palestine Liberation Army, there are at least halt dozen independent fedayeen organizations, most of them less interested in playing Arab politics (as was the P.L.A.) than in fielding effective guerrillas. The largest, and to all appearances the most dynamic, of them all is Asita (thunderstorm), the paramilitary arm of a broader political group named El Fatah, whose commandos call themselves storm troopers...