pettifoggery

The result is players are apt to fall victims to hornswoggling and pettifoggery on a huge scale.

Hopeless to seek either direct or indirect cooperation here; the man seemed a living definition of pettifoggery.

Please don't waste my time with your pettifoggery."

"You will find no pettifoggery aboard the Avventura!"

The captain had redeemed himself twenty times over for the little moments of pettifoggery, with four assassins at least to his personal credit.

Take the Saudi pettifoggery that forbids the practice of faiths other than Islam.

This obsession with legal pettifoggery has now imperiled your lives and mine, nay, even the fabric of our whole society!

They could kindly be called pettifoggery.

There was no purpose in antiquarian pettifoggery.

The play is about plain-dealing and plain-speaking, and its subtext deals with legal pettifoggery.

City Hall has kept the dispute alive by brushing aside the United Nations legal opinion as so much pettifoggery.

Distaste for pettifoggery and the sometimes absurd judgments pronounced by the courts gradually drove him to break with the legal profession.

In 1983, after pettifoggery by the Yugoslav secret police, Ošlak decided to move to Austria.

But now I'm afraid something terrible may be happening to Rose while you detain me with your spell-pinching pettifoggery."

The wounds from the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 are too raw, and the importance of this inquiry too great, to settle for ethical pettifoggery.

What really needs revising is the source of all the pettifoggery, past and present: the America's Cup Deed of Gift.

Cugel opened his mouth to stipulate the terms of his ticket, then closed it again; to remonstrate would seem an argument in favor of pettifoggery.

He resorts to pettifoggery at every turn, and his malversations manifest that he is in toto and effectually devoid of sensum moralis."

The lawyers and political advisers who have so poorly served Mr. Clinton must give up the self-defeating idea that they can win this case through parliamentary maneuvering and legal pettifoggery.

The Council pointed to another opinion, Kale v. Obuchowski, which derided a lawyer's argument as "pettifoggery" and concluded that the appeal was "frivolous, doomed and sanctionable".

What comes through time and again is a flood of anger against transit bosses, who are blamed for work rules, disciplinary codes and bottom-line pettifoggery that the drivers say demeans them.

First, the Republicans challenged absentee ballots from Democratic strongholds with pettifoggery like objecting to ballots on which voters wrote down Brooklyn instead of Kings as their county of residence.

The argument of concentrating entirely on economics as a last, desperate springboard for the development of Third World countries, which are unable to afford the luxury of environmental safeguards, is mere pettifoggery.

And they had good cause to wonder, for Albert and George had summoned lawyers from all across the nation to come to the land of oranges and bathing costumes, to wage their war of pettifoggery in the courts.

As the lawyers press forward with their eloquence - occasionally showboating or lapsing into procedural pettifoggery - the camera wanders through the courtyard and beyond, taking note of the small interactions between men and women, the old and the young, the busy and the idle.