So I did what my mom always tells me to do: I looked it up in our prized New World Encyclopedia collection, where I found a scant entry.
Yet here I am, a scant hour after the event, conspicuously clean and unsullied by blood.
I spend a scant five or six hours with a novel, sometimes only a little over an hour with a collection of poetry.
It's hard to describe the heartache I felt a scant four years ago when visiting Athens' Plaka, the charming, ancient neighborhood that abuts the Parthenon and Acropolis.
I've invested a scant few times, but when I have, it's been for people and projects I truly believed in and felt close to.
The other night, when I had only a scant hour and a half to make dinner for myself; my wife, Betsey; and four guests, my eye fell upon "New Food Fast" (Whitecap Books, 1999) by Donna Hay, an overachieving 30-year-old food writer with two best-sellers already to her credit.
I also shredded a scant 2-ounce (50-g) chunk of that Jersey Fresh cheese and mixed it with a little handful of grated pecorino; if I'd used mozzarella, I'd have sliced it and held it aside for a while wrapped it in a cloth that would wick away excess water, as I do for what passes for pizza in a domestic environment.
Whereas when I read Orwell's "1984," a scant few years later, I thought it could all too possibly become true: in the midst of the Cold War, it more or less already was.
If you live in the state of Washington, as I do, you've a scant six days left to legally drive whist text messaging, as a new law forbidding just that practice goes into effect on the first.
Then I hired a New York City architect to design a barn for me, complete with greenhouse, for a scant acre I had found next to the railroad out east in Sagaponack.
