(v. i.) To do a petty business as a lawyer; also, to do law business in a petty or tricky way.
(v. t.) To advocate like a pettifogger; to argue trickily; as, to pettifog a claim.
Example Sentences:
(1) An Israeli commentator said of the first of them: "when one looks through all the lofty phraseology, all the deliberate disinformation, the hundreds of pettifogging sections, sub-sections, appendices and protocols, one clearly recognises that the Israeli victory was absolute and Palestine defeat abject."
(2) He’s the ultimate Gary Stu character: a billionaire beholden to no one and able to abuse every disingenuous and pettifogging remora latched headfirst on the nation and sucking upward.
Quibble
Definition:
(n.) A shift or turn from the point in question; a trifling or evasive distinction; an evasion; a cavil.
(n.) A pun; a low conceit.
(v. i.) To evade the point in question by artifice, play upon words, caviling, or by raising any insignificant or impertinent question or point; to trifle in argument or discourse; to equivocate.
(v. i.) To pun; to practice punning.
Example Sentences:
(1) And please don’t quibble about whether you have any direct lineage to the architects of racism.
(2) Quibbling over whether fashion is more or less important than art is just as pointless as questioning whether or not it is art.
(3) And with four years as her nation’s chief diplomat on the world stage under her belt, Mrs Clinton’s personal gravitas is even harder to quibble with than it might have been in 2008.
(4) Dammers learned that Mandela had just one quibble with the Special AKA song.
(5) Other quibbles: some iPhone apps don't scale so brilliantly to such a large screen.
(6) To quibble further, one might say, is to simply argue about hinges.
(7) I find myself wondering how far I should go to say that FGM is the slicing off on a conscious young girl with no anaesthetic of her clitoris and labia... “This is a quibble about a couple of stitches and it is a complete distraction.” Mr Justice Sweeney, in summing up to the jury on Wednesday, said everyone accepted Dharmasena had saved the life of the woman’s baby in an emergency delivery on 24 November, 2012.
(8) "While I do quibble with the ethics (or lack of ethics) in posting the Salinger stories, they look to be true transcripts of the originals and match my own copies."
(9) You have explained how you have got caught up in this thing, you've explained your motives: I don't want to quibble about any of that.
(10) Even the US administration, which has repeatedly played up the uncertainties in climate science, has not quibbled with the inclusion of statements such as "human activities since 1750 have very likely (>90%) exerted a net warming influence on climate", and "further emissions of greenhouse gases would be expected to change the climate of the 21st century".
(11) No one could quibble with the report’s section on geopolitics.
(12) Certainly, some will quibble as to how much blame the federal government should receive for this economic downturn.
(13) But there's a bigger problem with the politics of idleness than quibbling over definitions.
(14) The next question is also on inflation but is a bit quibbly: what if inflation is like, you know, really big?
(15) Oh, there are quibbles, so many quibbles, some unfortunately presentational.
(16) Homewatt.co.uk sells LED bulbs and if you don't think they are suitable, use its seven-day no-quibble returns policy to get your money back.
(17) And for the hopefuls lining up outside the passport office: thou shalt not quibble about freedom of speech.
(18) But the deeper flaw was a complacent assumption that Labour was the moral choice, and that people would realise as much if only their misguided quibbles about public spending could be neutralised.
(19) Some quibbled about the methodology, but, taken at face value, the test yielded good and bad results.
(20) It's an understandable stance, since to quibble over the reasons why 15 million died in the first world war may well look unseemly, particularly for a politician hoping that his party replaces Gove's as government next year, but it doesn't have much of the lion about it.