Definitions
from The Century Dictionary.
- Practising pettifoggery: characteristic of or becoming to a pettifogger; petty; mean; paltry.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- adjective Paltry; quibbling; mean.
- noun Pettifoggery.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- verb Present participle of
pettifog .
Etymologies
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Examples
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This Mrs. Baxter called a pettifogging trick, and she pursued her parallel till the same terms were obviously indicated as appropriate to Quisanté's conduct.
Quisanté Anthony Hope 1898
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'GRACCHUS,' as the town called him, was a broken-down lawyer, who, as he got old, had prostituted the talents of his early days to the meanest kind of pettifogging and rascality.
The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 Devoted to Literature and National Policy Various
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Okay, before some pettifogging comment-lawyer jumps on me, criminality is not perfectly inverse to IQ: there is an IQ threshold below which individuals are too disabled even for a career of violent crime.
Why Do the Poor Commit More Crime?, Bryan Caplan | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty 2009
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Only a pettifogging fool would refuse to see the common thread and blather on about “ignoring the specificity.”
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But had I delayed to write just as I did in a peremptory tone, some old pettifogging, gossiping, soapsuds might in the interim have taken a delight in wounding your feelings by telling you that your committee folks meant to change their schoolmaster — I was determined that you should have the chance of resigning before you could hear it. —
Letter 336 2009
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The pettifogging was also meant to counterbalance the Clinton White House's own ethical woes.
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"I took it upon myself to ignore these pettifogging minutiae," he told author John McPhee.
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Only a pettifogging fool would refuse to see the common thread and blather on about “ignoring the specificity.”
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While pettifogging academics (a select few of whom he favors) complain that his catchy phrases and anecdotes sometimes obscure deeper analysis, by and large Friedman gets the big issues right.
An Amazon.com Books Blog featuring news, reviews, interviews and guest author blogs. 2008
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"I took it upon myself to ignore these pettifogging minutiae," he told author John McPhee.
raven_in_the_woods commented on the word pettifogging
acting as a lawyer in petty cases.
August 1, 2010