hair-splittings

H.L. Mencken made fun of the newly arrived poet in full flight from the provinces, appareled “in corduroy trousers and a velvet jacket, hammering furiously upon a pine table in a Macdougal street cellar … his discourse full of inane hair-splittings about vers libre, futurism, spectrism, vorticism …” Yet it is astonishing to reflect how long the Village managed to keep on regenerating itself, and helping to regenerate American culture and education.

Last Call, Bohemia Hitchens, Christopher 2008

All these pros and cons, these quibbles and hair-splittings were but a misfit attempt to cloak the truth.

Australia Felix 2003

Russian will never be infected with philosophical hair-splittings and nonsense; he has too much common-sense for that; but we must not let every sincere effort after truth and knowledge be attacked under the name of philosophy.

Rudin 2003

In the hands of Bahá the aims of the sect became much more practical and ethical, and the wilder pantheistic tendencies and metaphysical hair-splittings of the early Bábís almost disappeared.

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" Various

Peter was not versed in introspective questions or hair-splittings; he loved with his whole heart, and he had tried to say so without very much success.

Peter and Jane or The Missing Heir

It is only the special-pleadings and constitutional hair-splittings by which Slavery has been forced under national protection, that now impede Congressional intervention in the affairs of Utah.

The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 03, No. 19, May, 1859 Various

Fruitless excursions into metaphysical hair-splittings is meant, not a sound branch of learning like philosophy ....

A Compilaton on Scholarship Universal House of Justice

'O Sir Harry Vane,' thou, with thy subtle casuistries and abstruse hair-splittings, thou art other than a good one, I think!

Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 Various

Fruitless excursions into metaphysical hair-splittings is meant, not a sound branch of learning like philosophy.

A Compilaton on Scholarship Universal House of Justice

Hell, damnation, eternal tortures, painful theological hair-splittings, harrowing self-examinations, and humiliating public confessions -- this is what they gather on the narrow wooden benches to listen to hour after hour, searching their souls for sin with an almost frenzied eagerness.

The Old Coast Road From Boston to Plymouth Agnes Rothery