(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.
Squabble
Definition:
(v. i.) To contend for superiority in an unseemly maner; to scuffle; to struggle; to wrangle; to quarrel.
(v. i.) To debate peevishly; to dispute.
(v. t.) To disarrange, so that the letters or lines stand awry or are mixed and need careful readjustment; -- said of type that has been set up.
(n.) A scuffle; a wrangle; a brawl.
Example Sentences:
(1) On Thursday the word in Brussels was there would be fresh elections in April, a ballot likely to entrench the divide, deepen the crisis of political accountability and legitimacy, and result in yet further months of government-less squabbling.
(2) But living in modern Britain feels like being one of a family of anxious, squabbling children whose parents have abandoned us to get drunk at the casino.
(3) What we are seeing is the government really squabbling over what is such an important and profound piece of legislation for our country, like kids in a schoolyard.” Shorten told reporters on Sunday the government’s citizenship laws were “rapidly descending into a farce”, and called on it to urgently release the text of the legislation so Labor could scrutinise it.
(4) Precisely how juvenile was, of course, open to yet more squabbling.
(5) My son’s Guyanese-Canadian teacher and the Muslim Milton scholar I went to high school with and the Sikh writer I squabble about Harold Innis with and my Ishmaeli accountant, we can all be good little Torontonians of the middle class, deflecting the differences we have been trained to respect.
(6) There is boardroom squabbling, the workforce is in open revolt and there are no new product lines.
(7) Nor are they exotic Mafia hits like the killing of Castellano; these are low-level whackings, often linked to squabbles over drugs.
(8) At the time they were stressful – battling with traffic, fights over radio stations, squabbles over who was going to sit in the front seat and listening to a muddle of languages together with drama lines and songs to be sung.
(9) "The squabbles will be bitter and vicious if the first salvoes in this war are anything to go by.
(10) Amid squabbles over boundary changes, mansion tax, Europe and the NHS, each of them was up for the fight.
(11) Momentum Hastings seems pleasantly free of the kind of dogmatic, acrimonious squabbles that have recently engulfed the movement at national level.
(12) Likewise, he feels, parenting is too important to fall foul of party political squabbles.
(13) We kids had obviously been squabbling and had been banned from making any noise or, "I'll stop the car and bang your heads together!"
(14) When superpowers and former superpowers squabble, lives are ruined.
(15) Preparatory talks last month in Bangkok ended in acrimonious squabbles .
(16) The same can't be said of our squabbles at the decade's end.
(17) She had lived for a long time in the shadow of her unfaithful husband, and, uninterested in the perennial squabbles of the Chilean left, the coup turned her into a significant political figure in her own right.
(18) A new body is to be elected to do the job, but with arguments raging over the place of Sharia law in that constitution, and with regional leaders squabbling for influence, there is no sign of when those elections will happen.
(19) If the experiment has been a disaster for Greece, it is also a colossal failure for Europe , with the result that at the very apex of leadership the EU nowadays resembles an unhappy assembly of squabbling politicians locked in what could not be called an “ever closer union”.
(20) From the lawn we could see nothing but tree tops and the only interruption to lazy mornings on the terrace was the noise of squabbling langur monkeys and green parrots.