(superl.) Little; trifling; inconsiderable; also, inferior; subordinate; as, a petty fault; a petty prince.
Example Sentences:
(1) The only thing the media will talk about in the hours and days after the debate will be Trump’s refusal to say he will accept the results of the election, making him appear small, petty and conspiratorial.
(2) I realize it’s petty, but it’s like the Michael Bolton thing from Office Space.
(3) Winston Churchill, when he was offered the role of minister of the local government board in 1906, commented: "There is no place more laborious, more anxious, more thankless, more cloaked with petty and even squalid detail, more full of hopeless and insoluble difficulties."
(4) Let’s make sure it’s not on the usual plane of politics and point-scoring and pettiness that drifts away in the next news cycle.
(5) We took all the feedback from users and put pencil to paper to create our consumer 3D printer built for speed and ease of use,” said Pettis.
(6) Facebook Twitter Pinterest China dismisses Trump call with Taiwan as ‘small trick’ However, Beijing’s public response has so far been measured, with the foreign ministry lodging a “solemn representation” with Washington and the foreign minister, Wang Yi, downplaying the development as “a petty move” by Taiwan.
(7) She won’t apologize for whatever makes the New York Times treat her with middle-school levels of petty scorn .
(8) The president should have directed the Justice Department to stop taking stupid points and petty appeals.” One reason the Justice Department pursued the habeas cases so hard was its client: the Pentagon.
(9) As the locus of many migrants' investments, the village of Los Pinos has experienced a modest growth in the number of full-time jobs paying somewhat above the minimum urban wage and in a variety of petty entrepreneurial activities depending heavily on the patronage of migrant households, themselves heavily subsidized by remittances.
(10) Indeed watching the prime minister singling out unemployed youngsters for uniquely punitive measures while pretending it is for their own good, cheered on by a gang of braying chums, it looks less like the behaviour of a national statesman and more like the petty vindictiveness of a schoolyard bully.
(11) Some are retired, others straddle the uncertain worlds of petty trading, agriculture and seasonal migrant labour.
(12) Not long ago, the mecca of American tourism was populated by sex workers, transvestites, drug addicts and petty criminals, rather than middle-class tourists.
(13) All the petty differences that divide us seem to melt away.
(14) Abdeslam relied on a large network of friends and relatives that already existed for drug dealing and petty crime to keep him in hiding,” Belgium’s federal prosecutor, Frederic Van Leeuw, told Belgian public broadcaster RTBF.
(15) Another said: "The problem with PMQs isn't so much that it's shouty but that the so-called pinnacle of political debate in this country is two men trading petty insults and making nasty jokes about the other while the rest of parliament boos and cheers behind them.
(16) They included a former monk, two young men with learning disabilities, a handful of petty criminals and a teacher at a private school in Paris who was "disappeared" by another republican group, the INLA.
(17) The study was conducted in the three contiguous counties of Johnson, Lafayette and Pettis in west central Missouri.
(18) Edgar Mitchell, the Apollo 14 Lunar Module Pilot, said that walking on the Moon gives you an instant global consciousness, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it, that international politics look so petty.
(19) It also found that some children were put into care without lawful basis, including for petty theft and for being rude.
(20) Parents are required to bring up children responsibly, while living in a form of servitude to licensed employers and petty line managers, often themselves at risk of returning to zero-hours.
Pity
Definition:
(n.) Piety.
(n.) A feeling for the sufferings or distresses of another or others; sympathy with the grief or misery of another; compassion; fellow-feeling; commiseration.
(n.) A reason or cause of pity, grief, or regret; a thing to be regretted.
(v. t.) To feel pity or compassion for; to have sympathy with; to compassionate; to commiserate; to have tender feelings toward (any one), awakened by a knowledge of suffering.
(v. t.) To move to pity; -- used impersonally.
(v. i.) To be compassionate; to show pity.
Example Sentences:
(1) The voters don’t do gratitude, self-pitying politicians are wont to moan.
(2) With grievous amazement, never self-pitying but sometimes bordering on a sort of numbed wonderment, Levi records the day-to-day personal and social history of the camp, noting not only the fine gradations of his own descent, but the capacity of some prisoners to cut a deal and strike a bargain, while others, destined by their age or character for the gas ovens, follow "the slope down to the bottom, like streams that run down to the sea".
(3) "); hopeless self-pity ("Nobody said anything to me about Billy ... all day long") and rage ("You want to put a bench in the park in Billy's name?
(4) Indeed, mainstream economics is a pitifully thin distillation of historical wisdom on the topics that it addresses.
(5) Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever?” It is there to remind him that the dots are worth fighting for.
(6) Last year, Amnesty International described the world’s response as “pitiful” and earlier this week, the UN special rapporteur on the human rights of migrants called on the EU to deliver a proper resettlement programme.
(7) April's family had to endure the "spectacle of your hypocritical sympathy for their loss and of your tears", the judge told Bridger, saying any tears were motivated purely by self-pity.
(8) And this is the mainspring of so many of his stories, novellas, and his one novel, Beware of Pity : the clash between propriety and desire.
(9) It’s actually a pity that there’s now a break because I wanted to continue playing games,” said the Italian.
(10) In his final fight, against the journeyman boxer Kevin McBride, he was a pitiful figure - slumped in a corner, legs splayed, unable or unwilling to stand himself up.
(11) Other negative emotions – self-pity, guilt, apathy, pessimism, narcissism – make it a deeply unattractive illness to be around, one that requires unusual levels of understanding and tolerance from family and friends.
(12) He said it was a “pity” that the UK prime minister “wasn’t able to express the British position at the press conference with Donald Trump standing next to her”.
(13) As the turbulent commercial radio sector enters another new phase, Park wants to sweep away the thinking that has left too many of his colleagues wallowing in self-pity, and turn his fire on a familiar target.
(14) Broadly defined, this sort of behaviour involves procrastination, stubbornness, resentment, sullenness, obstructionism, self-pity and a tendency to create chaotic situations.
(15) It is a pity we did not take our chances,” the Ukraine coach, Mykhailo Fomenko, said.
(16) "This depressing morning has now got me questioning my pitiful existence," sobs James Dodge.
(17) Foreign dignitaries were invited to attend for the first time and it is a pity that from Europe only Javier Solana chose to take the offer up.
(18) Men convicted of rape are often pitied in the media and, like Evans, quickly vault back to positions of fame .
(19) But after the strange denials that this old, sick man is dying I want to talk not with pity but of his power.
(20) Staff here dread the welfare reform bill, waiting for debts, arrears, evictions and pitiful hardship to wash up on their doorstep.