| 释义 |
Definition of hair-splitting in English: hair-splittingadjective Characterized by or fond of small and overfine distinctions. 以作琐细区分为特点的；爱作琐细区分的 the legal experts have a particularly hair-splitting mentality 法律专家有一种特别爱作琐细区分的心态。 Example sentencesExamples - Any delineation between the nominally public and non-public spheres is now a hair-splitting irrelevancy.
- It's bad luck and bad timing, but it does count for something in this hair-splitting contest.
- There's plenty of artful writing and thought here, and her wit makes even the excess historical padding and linguistic hair-splitting palatable.
- A good example of this is the often hair-splitting legal distinctions between valid and invalid transfers.
- The pursuit of physics by hair-splitting quibbles and scholastic logic applied to Aristotle's texts, as in this first long manuscript of Galileo's, was more an elaborate verbal game than an investigation of Nature.
- Then they became immersed in hair-splitting debates about difficult ‘moral’ decisions but within a context where everything was justified if politically useful.
- The fact that he is operating in such a crowded field, and the need to demonstrate originality, leads the author into a number of distracting, hair-splitting arguments, often with fairly marginal historians.
- Ecclesiastical historians will tell you that hair-splitting issues are the ones that cause havoc among the zealots.
- I've never been surer of anything in my life, despite what they say about their hair-splitting coverage.
- How can the Supreme Court possibly know what the most divisive policy is with respect to these hair-splitting distinctions.
Synonyms quibbling, fault-finding, niggling, cavilling, carping, captious, critical, criticizing, disapproving, censorious, judgemental, overcritical, hypercritical, pedantic, punctilious, pettifogging Scottish & Irish pass-remarkable informal nitpicking, pernickety, picky North American informal persnickety archaic nice, overnice
noun mass nounThe action of making small and overfine distinctions; quibbling. 以作琐细区分为特点的；爱作琐细区分的 Example sentencesExamples - Newspapers and radio call-in shows were awash with the rage of people who spared little thought for the judge's legal and scientific hair-splitting.
- If it all sounds like too much hair-splitting to you, it probably is.
- You can argue that the lawyers are hair-splitting.
- A few liberal blogs are resisting the conclusions and some hair-splitting is going on about micro-details of line spacing and superscript heights.
- Avoid complicated issues of public policy; the people need to have their hearts lifted by statements of steely resolve, and there's little time for wonky hair-splitting.
- A jury isn't going to convict on that kind of legal hair-splitting, and I think the prosecutor realized that.
- Even the most intelligent and well-intentioned judge can create a mess by indulging in hair-splitting that, at least on its own narrow terms, may seem reasonable.
- To argue that this is bad news because it is slightly higher than analysts expected is surely to enter the realm of statistical hair-splitting.
- This is more than just legal hair-splitting - this designation carries a litany of legal implications, from his ability to be interrogated to his rights at trial.
- The aim of these fine distinctions, not to say hair-splitting, is to deny the Marxist thesis that the driving forces of the war were rooted in economic and geopolitical conflicts of the major capitalist powers.
Synonyms dogmatism, purism, literalism, formalism
Derivativesnoun Human consciousness is too important to be left to the hair-splitters. Example sentencesExamples - However, don't go endlessly back and forth between suppliers in an attempt to grind out a rock-bottom price, otherwise you'll be marked down as a time waster and a hair-splitter.
- They are the most preposterous and unjustified of all the guesses which can be made about the universe, and I am not enough of a hair-splitter to pretend that I don't regard them as arrant and negligible moonshine.
|