(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.
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.