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Pettifogger   Listen
Pettifogger

noun
1.
A person (especially a lawyer or politician) who uses unscrupulous or unethical methods.  Synonym: shyster.
2.
A disputant who quibbles; someone who raises annoying petty objections.  Synonyms: caviler, caviller, quibbler.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Pettifogger" Quotes from Famous Books



... an English paragraph (and many who cannot,) every pettifogger without practice, every one whose poverty or crimes have just left him cash or credit enough to procure a press and types, sets up ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)

... respectable-looking individual was never seen; he really looked what he was, a gentleman of the law—there was nothing of the pettifogger about him: somewhat under the middle size, and somewhat rotund in person, he was always dressed in a full suit of black, never worn long enough to become threadbare. His face was rubicund, and not without keenness; but the most ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter

... matter of course, I was often outwitted and defeated, much to my chagrin. In one case submitted to arbitration, a pettifogger of bad repute by the name of Baldwin secured an award palpably unjust. I felt more keenly than my client the injustice done him, and never forgave Baldwin until he was indicted for perjury and driven out of the ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman

... seemed to be an old offender. He went on with asking, if I believed in transubstantiation; but I treated the notion of real presence with such disrespect, that his patron was scandalised at my impiety, and commanded him to proceed to the plot. Whereupon this miserable pettifogger told me, there was great reason to suspect me of being a spy on board, and that I had entered into a conspiracy with Thompson, and others not yet detected, against the life of Captain Oakum, which accusation they pretended to support by the evidence of our boy, ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett

... in search Of a godly course, and willing, he said, Nay, anxious to join the Puritan church, He made of all this but small account, And passed his idle hours instead With roystering Morton of Merry Mount, That pettifogger from Furnival's Inn, Lord of misrule and riot and sin, Who looked on the wine ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... forever; while a few years later tidings were received of the death of Harold Scott Mainwaring at sea. I also learned that about this time Richard Hobson suddenly rose from the position of a penniless pettifogger to that of an affluent attorney, though he was engaged in questionable speculations far more than in ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour



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