How To Use Pettifog In A Sentence

  • Yet Phil Woolas, the immigration minister (and, as I well remember a nasty little self-centred careerist when he was head of the National Union Students in my college days - a real horrible little greasy pole climber who obviously hasn't changed one jot) continues to prevaricate and pettifog. Global Voices in English » The Gurkhas: Long History Of Discrimination
  • The unintended consequence is empowerment of the moneyed few that can still afford the overpriced beltway pettifogger who knows the ropes. Stuart Whatley: This Side of Democracy
  • That is not literary criticism; that is pettifoggery. The Indonesian Way
  • Thus women could practice law in some areas or cases at the level of amateur pettifoggers, a situation that led some western observers to believe that the Russian legal profession was much more open to women than it was.
  • The chief pettifogger and Energizer Bunny for the pro-Clinton forces was political strategist James Carville, whose official title was Senior Political Adviser to the President. Blood Sugar
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  • One of the many pettifogging annoyances of being a chap is the complete inability to explain how one would like one's hair cut.
  • These concerns for purity should not be understood as pettifogging legalism.
  • The pharisaical, malefic, and incogitant Guidelines for Bias-Free Writing is a product of the pointy-headed wowsers at the Association of American University Presses who established a Task Force on Bias-Free Language filled with cranks, pokenoses, blowhards, four-flushers, and pettifogs. P.J. O’Wowser
  • The popular understanding of the word _criticize_ is to find fault, to pettifog. Plum Pudding Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned
  • The advice given yesterday with an assurance that only a settled and undoubting conviction could possibly excuse, was to-day pettifogged away mainly on the ground of Charley's worldly prosperity. The Faith Doctor A Story of New York
  • The pharisaical, malefic, and incogitant Guidelines for Bias-Free Writing is a product of the pointy-headed wowsers at the Association of American University Presses who established a Task Force on Bias-Free Language filled with cranks, pokenoses, blowhards, four-flushers, and pettifogs. P.J. O’Wowser
  • The one thing that Labour has been entirely consistent about is its pettifogging parliamentarism, its proceduralism, its gradualism and its timidity before capital and the Establishment.
  • Of such squeamish pettifoggery are cultural declines made! Socialist Hate Speech of Antiquity, Bryan Caplan | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty
  • Okay, before some pettifogging comment-lawyer jumps on me, criminality is not perfectly inverse to IQ: there is an IQ threshold below which individuals are too disabled even for a career of violent crime. Why Do the Poor Commit More Crime?, Bryan Caplan | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty
  • Marius, my boy, you are a Baron, you are rich, don't go to pettifogging , I beg of you.
  • But Fom was never known to lie; she only pettifogged. The Madigans
  • BTW My lawschool study group met in a Brownstone actually red brick, but why pettifog on Warren St off Court, not far from your address. "This Supreme Court is quite clearly the enemy of progressivism.... What is to be done?"
  • Rehnquist's disdain for drawn-out cases and pettifoggery by lawyers is legendary. A President In The Dock
  • In the name of a bogus crisis in broadband deployment, the FCC is today lathering on an array of network stimuli and subsidies as part of a new "National Broadband Plan" that will transform this current font of U.S. economic growth into a consumer of taxes and a playground for pettifogs. Cap and Trade for the Internet
  • When a sergeant at the Police Academy asked Mr. Conlon if he had really attended Harvard, he replied with a pettifoggery worthy of his white-shoe classmates: "Not lately, Sarge" is the literal truth camouflaged as sarcasm. A Quietly Remarkable Memoir Walks a Beat From H.U. to NYPD
  • Before this I had ventured to try a few law cases before justices of the peace, both in the country, in villages, and in the city, and I had some professional triumphs, occasionally over a regular attorney, but more commonly meeting the "pettifogger," who was of Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 A Political History of Slavery in the United States Together With a Narrative of the Campaigns and Battles of the Civil War In Which the Author Took Part: 1861-1865
  • He had long been reading law in his curious, spasmodically concentrated way, and he had practised a little as a "pettifogger," that is, an unlicensed practitioner in the inferior courts. Abraham Lincoln
  • Why do you pettifog about actions that would be indefensible in any other realm? Sternberg complaint dismissed - The Panda's Thumb
  • I don't know what Mr. Samuels is getting at, but do I smell a whiff of pettifoggery here? The Indonesian Way
  • But if it was and is the purpose of those for whom you pettifog to keep woman off the platform of that History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I
  • Verb to pettifog (third-person singular simple present pettifogs, present participle pettifogging, simple past and past participle pettifogged) 8500 was just a number I picked out of thin air. Hazel8500
  • As a staunch conservative Whig he especially loathed President Polk aliberalDemocrot, but he also despised General ZacharyTaylor, another Democrat who acted as if he too hoped to be the next president. ffis ultimate scorn, however, was reserved for Gideon J. Pillow, a pettifog - ging lawyer from a small. town in Tennessee, who was so ineffectual that Clay could not understand why Scott even bothered with him. Mexico
  • Only the most Lilliputian of political outlooks could consider these kind of pettifogging government measures ‘bold and far-reaching’.
  • Hopeless to seek either direct or indirect cooperation here; the man seemed a living definition of pettifoggery. Trullion: Alastor 2262
  • The theological pettifoggery of their literalistic religion has to be read to be believed.
  • Under the blow and forbiddance from the government, secret pettifogger handbooks of the Ming and Qing Dynasty didn t disappear, but become perfect and systematic.
  • They have obfuscated, delayed, lied, backtracked, pettifogged, and cancelled all sorts of commitments under the informal and formal rubrics of the Oslo process.
  • Although now I have to thank you Andy Pandy because I'm now aware that I'm a pettifogger sense 2. Ambiguity: Mixed Messages and Style Overlap
  • This proves, according to Ezra, that conservative and Republican opposition to the current iteration of the individual mandate is just legal pettifoggery and political opportunism. Give me liberty or give me health care
  • The pharisaical, malefic, and incogitant Guidelines for Bias-Free Writing is a product of the pointy-headed wowsers at the Association of American University Presses who established a Task Force on Bias-Free Language filled with cranks, pokenoses, blowhards, four-flushers, and pettifogs. P.J. O’Wowser
  • self-evident," since become awkward of acceptance, were ever thus pettifogged out of the path, and fundamental principles have in this way prescriptively been tampered with. "Imperialism" and "The Tracks of Our Forefathers"
  • Ames's tavern sign, then, plays on the tension between lawyers with formal legal training like Dudley, and village tavern keepers and pettifoggers like Ames himself.
  • Either they have no idea what is at stake, or they place pettifogging bureaucracy above all else.
  • He should have consented to know but the grand personal adventure on the grand personal basis: nothing short of this, no poor cognisance of confusable, pettifogging things, the sphere of earth-grubbing questions and two-penny issues, would begin to be, on any side, Olympian enough. The Finer Grain
  • Seeing through Julia's pettifoggery, the judge overruled her frivolous objection.
  • To do otherwise faces America with the stark choice of going to War with Russia because some pettifogger who is Head of State in one of those Countries has a bone to pick, and picks it because NATO is with us, or withdrawing from the NATO Treaty rather than go to War. Ilan Goldenberg: The Powell Endorsement and the End of the Republican Foreign Policy Establishment
  • It is at best but a pettifogging, pickthank business to decompose actions into little personal motives, and explain heroism away. Virginibus Puerisque and other papers
  • Then there are Rice's own inconsistencies in her public statements, the transcripts of which are a gold mine of contradiction and pettifoggery. April 2004
  • Brannan, or McGowan, or all the rest of the boodling, land-grabbing, pettifogging crew! The Gray Dawn
  • In such an argument there would always be matter for answers, rejoinders, replications, triplications, quadruplications, and that infinite web of disputes that our pettifoggers have spun out as far as they could in favor of lawsuits.
  • He probably thought the auditors were pettifogging about practices ‘everyone does’ and that different auditors wouldn't be so picky.
  • “Pray, who mentioned money, Mr. Meiklewham?” said her ladyship. — “That wretched old pettifogger,” she added in Saint Ronan's Well
  • Fancy a creature that has pettifogged, as an underling too, all his life. ' That Stick
  • He pettifogs with his witnesses to establish his theory. Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 Devoted to Literature and National Policy
  • Wondering: why people watch entertainment tv. .still .... that, and why words like pettifogger aren't used in the everyday anymore. Stem-d Diary Entry
  • Pettifoggery has come to mean legal chicanery, and last week a Senate subcommittee consultant used the word to describe a weakness of U.S. negotiators in dealing with Communist powers.
  • It is true that he made amends by adding, when his lecture was published, a counter statement; but that such a man should have seriously cited such a work shows the widespread mischief done among people not versed in engineering lore by the admirably written romance of Smiles, who as Edward C. Knight, in his Mechanical Dictionary, truly declares, has "pettifogged the whole case. Scientific American Supplement, No. 620, November 19,1887
  • Well, we have words for people like that: nitpickers, fusspots, pettifoggers.
  • Let the rest of the guttersnipes pettifog about celebrity doping. The Indignity of Commuting by Bicycle: The Dignity of Attending a Press Conference
  • … Collectively these newcomers wielded billions of dollars of available capital, petawatts of imperious brainpower, a practiced disdain for bureaucratic pettifogs, and Olympian con fi dence in their own judgment and capabilities. SeekingAlpha.com: Home Page
  • Giving new meaning to the terms “Philadelphia Lawyer”, “pettifogger”, “law monger”. Watch Biden make a gaffe about a gaffe right in front of Obama...
  • And some want to have everything done accurately, while others are annoyed by accuracy, either because they cannot follow the connexion of thought or because they regard it as pettifoggery. Metaphysics
  • While the law asserts otherwise, Truth's activism demonstrates the capacity of disfranchised Americans to seize legal agency, to demand a voice ‘among the pettifoggers.’
  • The rest of Dr.T. 's epistle is pettifoggery, but I am surprised that a scholarly person, who should be conversant with the findings of modern Russian history (from Kliuchevsky onward to Crankshaw), would defend the wholly discredited Romanov dynasty, which inflicted such continuous harm on Russian culture. Cranberry Jello
  • Verb to pettifog (third-person singular simple present pettifogs, present participle pettifogging, simple past and past participle pettifogged) 8500 was just a number I picked out of thin air. Hazel8500
  • It wouldn't do me any good to pettifog in this matter. Opening a Chestnut Burr
  • Their concern was brushed off as a pettifogging detail rather than an understandable concern.
  • But if it was and is the purpose of those for whom you pettifog to keep woman off the platform of that convention and deny her any part in its proceedings except as a spectator, what does all your talk about The Life and Work of Susan B Anthony 01

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