All 4 Uses of
scarcity
in
Not Without My Daughter
- To teach Essey how to cook steak or mashed potatoes would require extensive shopping trips, searching for scarce ingredients.†
*scarce = in short supply OR barely or hardly (by a small margin)
- It would take only a dozan (a two-rial coin), worth about half a cent, and somewhat scarce.†
- In turn, they notified us whenever scarce items became available, and they saved their best portions for us.†
- Together Alice and I searched the scarce supplies for Thanksgiving dinner.†
Definitions:
-
(1)
(scarcity) shortage (having an amount that is less than desired)
-
(2)
(meaning too rare to warrant focus) meaning too rare to warrant focus:
More rarely (and typically in classic literature), scarce can be short for scarcely or hardly or barely or by a small margin -- such as in "She was scarce ten years old," or "I scarce know why."