Nary? Barely? Care We?

Called on his less than close reading of Joshua Marshall's article on Bush in the New Yorker, Andrew Sullivan pleads ignorance of the mother tongue:

Now technically speaking, there is one direct mention of 9/11 in a piece of several thousand words. For the record, I feel bound to correct that. I also made a dumber error that I do not proffer as an excuse, just an explanation: I intended "nary" to mean "barely." My original version of the item - on my draft document sheet - says simply 'not.' Realizing that was technically not true, I changed it to "nary" on the blog, thinking that would cover it. Not according to the dictionary.

Yet Sully has used "nary" before, and not to suggest "barely":

Gay journo Andrew Sullivan has inveighed against the media for effectively reprinting last year's CDC press release that one in three young black gay men has HIV. "Complete reiteration of CDC orthodoxy," he complained in June in The New Republic, "with nary an attempt to subject any of it to the teeniest bit of skepticism or statistical analysis." (link)

"Bill Clinton was and is a compulsive logorrheic. There wasn't a problem he couldn't talk his way into and out of, while doing nothing much at all except hiring more lawyers and keeping otherwise innocent people awake at night. There was barely a word he couldn't distort, nary a phrase he couldn't render meaningless by repetition. He was the president who will be remembered as redefining 'is' to evade what was." (link)

In addition, Sully's claim that he meant "barely" rather than "none" or "not" is wholly inconsistent with the language used in his original post: "SPOT THE MISSING PIECE," "For the Clintonites, 9/11 didn't really happen," "So if Marshall hasn't noticed 9/11...." "Lacuna," for fuck's sake!

Interesting that Sully would rather appear illiterate than admit he didn't read and re-read Marshall's short article, as he claimed. Very telling.