Pettifogulize

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.

But, oh my yes, women do often imagine that they love, and with all that faded and pettifogulizing ammunition of theirs—lipstick, rouge, pomade, and no end of swabbings from the stybian pot—pointedly set out to do so.