Word: pettier
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...would not get party and KGB approval for promotions or assignments abroad. I cannot count the hours I spent in party organization meetings in the ministry, listening to or delivering dull reports on doctrinal matters or on the foibles and failings of other "comrades." As a rule, the pettier the subject, the longer the discussion...
Charleston's Post called Days' letter "an arrogant piece of folly." Attorney and School Board Member John Graham Altman described it as "a parting shot by some people who are losing their jobs shortly. Let the Government sue." Charleston politicians chose to see the crackdown in even pettier terms-as an attempt to create an embarrassment for South Carolina Republican Strom Thurmond, who will head the Senate Judiciary Committee in the 97th Congress. Thurmond agreed. Said he: "South Carolina didn't go to Carter this year, and it's a little funny that they decide...
...speech, the debates were more than a game. The added edge to reporters' questions came from a frustrated feeling that here at last the candidates should be pinned down. As John Chancellor said in a recent speech, "I don't think I've ever seen a pettier campaign, an emptier campaign, a campaign so lacking in a discussion of real issues." Even in the debates, the candidates had narrowed the range of things they intended to say no matter how a question was put; they were, until the last and best debate, often demeaningly petty; they felt...
...generally bright and attractive strain of the breed, engage in childish games of status and snubbing that would move even the most vulgar and climbing Washington hostess to disgust. For one who accepted a semester at Harvard as a kind of reverse sabbatical--an academic retreat from the pettier aspects of politics--it is all rather...
...notion that the past was better, more straightforward, more honest. The fact is that in freewheeling 19th-century America, high-level fraud was far more spectacular than today, when business, trade and politics must function under rigid controls and searching publicity. What has increased is the opportunity for the pettier kinds of cheating, largely because of the growth of communities and of population. In the urbanizing world in which crossroads are turning into shopping centers, towns into cities, and cities into megalopolises, nobody knows his neighbor's name-or feels responsible to him. The impersonality of the supermarket...