pettifogulize

Example Sentences

• "So far from seeking to "pettifogulise"—i.e., to find evasions for any purpose in a trickster's minute tortuosities of construction—exactly in the opposite direction, from mere excess of sincerity, most unwillingly I found, in almost everybody's words, an unintentional opening left for double interpretations."
• "On these high authorities I rest my case, and when I quote from these adjudications you will find to your dismay and horror that you are nothing but a pettifogulizing idiot."
• "“To pettifogulize,” says De Quincey, “is to find evasions for any purpose in a trickster’s minute tortuosities of construction.” Hermeneutic theology, according to this definition, is mere pettifogulizing systematized and elevated to the dignity of a sacred science."
• "I remember an attempt a few years ago to pettifogulize the Legislature in this State, when the small attorney met this unanswerable claim to representation by stating that he conceded the women had a right to be represented, but they were all represented now, for they had brothers or fathers or cousins or husbands, or ought to have, who could and did represent them."
• "Is the case to be pettifogulized? Will this great government stifle evidence in a court of justice in order to convict a man?"
• "And when, during the next semester, we were expected to read widely outside of class, but to pettifogulize (as I might have said then) with our professor over a handful of philological problems, though I roamed far abroad in the chivalric lais and romances, I was so frequently absent from our linguistic symposia that I had to be content with a rather disreputable grade."