Word: picayunish
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...rowing on the Thames," Swayze recalled. "Harvey had some problems coaching us, though; he had to ride a bicycle along the crowded towpath on the riverside. The team's only problem was the Thames' queen swans and British officials who usually put us on edge with their picayunish observances of lining-up procedures...
...Ammunition. On the congressional front, the safety hubbub continued. Detroit scrapped its proposal that car safety standards could best be set by the automakers themselves through a voluntary-action program. That plan had pleased no one-least of all President Johnson, who two weeks ago blasted Detroit for its "picayunish" objections to the Administration's highway-safety bill...
...President seized the first opportunity at his press conference to volunteer an implied rebuke for Radford's skepticism: so important is it for the U.S. to "work on this business of disarmament," said Ike, that it must not find itself "recalcitrant . . . picayunish about the thing. We ought to have an open mind and make it possible for others ... to meet us halfway." At the end of the 2½-hour White House meeting, Dulles announced that the President had personally "resolved" the remaining "unresolved issues" in U.S. disarmament policy, and had made the final decisions...
...British Broadcasting Corp. caught a blast from fiery Conductor Sir Thomas Beecham when it offered him a picayunish fee of $60 for a broadcast of "his arrangement of Michael Balfe's The Bohemian Girl. The "arrangement," wrote Sir Thomas, already a bit edgy from an attack of gout, "has involved the thoughts of 25 years ... at no time and nowhere in the course of a long career have I received such a preposterously inadequate, thoughtlessly impudent and magnificently inept offer from anyone." Thoroughly singed by the explosion, an abashed BBC hastily made a "substantially higher" offer, and Sir Thomas...
After a spell as a reporter for City Editor Lincoln Steffens of the Commercial Advertiser and for the New York Sun, Cahan in 1902 became editor of the then struggling Forward, which he had helped found five years before. Cahan found a paper with a picayunish circulation of 6,000, full of tedious, dust-dry Socialist polemics, written in jabberwocky that few garment workers could understand...