(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.
Punctilious
Definition:
(a.) Attentive to punctilio; very nice or exact in the forms of behavior, etiquette, or mutual intercourse; precise; exact in the smallest particulars.
Example Sentences:
(1) It is a sorry reminder that physical evidence must be closeted with care and punctiliously marked for later courtroom uses.
(2) The attorney general, George Brandis, sprang to the defence of Heydon, saying the commissioner had an “absolutely stainless reputation for punctilious integrity” and his withdrawal from the event should be the end of the matter.
(3) John Prescott's department published an annual Opportunities for All report that punctiliously monitored these social targets: 48 out of 59 indicators improved.
(4) Young love; pageantry delivered punctiliously; and old love, too.
(5) All he can do – if, as he appears to, he shares the shock of other national leaders – is to join international efforts to establish what happened, even if the results may be unwelcome, and show a punctilious regard for due process.
(6) But France, too, must be punctilious about observing all judicial proprieties.
(7) Experts think authorities are likely to be punctilious in complying with legal requirements given the close scrutiny.
(8) Good-hearted, apparently punctilious people show bias without realising it and may well be taken back or affronted if anyone suggests they have acted unfairly.
(9) Photograph: Frank Martin It’s the same sense of fairness that means that, sometimes in the cracks, while writing about other things, he takes time to punctiliously acknowledge his influences – Alan Coren , for example, who pioneered so many of the techniques of short humour that Terry and I have filched over the years; or the glorious, overstuffed, heady thing that is Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable and its compiler, t he Rev E Cobham Brewer , that most serendipitious of authors.
(10) Brandis disputed the description of the event as a fundraiser, saying Heydon had an “absolutely stainless reputation for punctilious integrity” and his withdrawal should be the end of the matter.
(11) Brandis defended Heydon in typically florid terms on Thursday: “He has an absolutely stainless reputation for punctilious integrity.” Yet this was the same man who, in what is regarded as his job application speech at a Quadrant dinner for Mary Gaudron’s vacancy, rather nastily attacked Sir Anthony Mason and the high court under his chief justiceship.
(12) Two obligatory conditions of effective surgery are emphasized: punctilious performance of all the particulars of the operation and postoperative cytostatic therapy.
(13) "Well, Andrew," he says, in that punctiliously courteous way Americans have of employing your name as if it's an honorific, "right at the moment, I'm chief justice of the Nevada Supreme Court."
(14) But the government has defended both the commission and the commissioner, with the attorney general, George Brandis, saying Heydon had an “absolutely stainless reputation for punctilious integrity” and his withdrawal from the event should be the end of the matter.