Both Uses
sufficient
in
Crediting Poetry, by Seamus Heaney
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- So, partly as a result of having internalized these attitudes through growing up with them, and partly as a result of growing a skin to protect myself against them, I went for years half-avoiding and half —resisting the opulence and extensiveness of poets as different as Wallace Stevens and Rainer Maria Rilke; crediting insufficiently the crystalline inwardness of Emily Dickinson, all those forked lightnings and fissures of association; and missing the visionary strangeness of Eliot.†
insufficiently = inadequately (in a manner that does not provide enough)standard prefix: The prefix "in-" in insufficiently means not and reverses the meaning of sufficiently. This is the same pattern you see in words like invisible, incomplete, and insecure.
- Attending insufficiently to the diamond absolutes, among which must be counted the sufficiency of that which is absolutely imagined.†
*
Definitions:
-
(1)
(sufficient) adequate (enough -- often without being more than is needed)
- (2) (meaning too rare to warrant focus)