nitpick
v.
pay obsessive attention to petty flaws or details
Nitpicking
Nitpicking is the act of removing
nits (the eggs of
lice, generally
head lice) from the host's
hair. As the nits are cemented to individual hairs with louse
saliva, they cannot be removed with
lice combs and, before modern
chemical methods were invented, the only options were to shave all the host's hair or to pick them free one by one.
See more at Wikipedia.org...
nitpick
Verb
1. be overly critical; criticize minor details
(hypernym) knock, criticize, criticise, pick apart
(derivation) nitpicker
nitpick
find unfinished details or small errors Deborah can find the errors. She likes to nitpick.
nitpick
Synonyms and related words:
around the bush, beat about, beg the question, bicker, boggle, carp, catch at straws, cavil, choplogic, cut up, dodge, equivocate, evade, evade the issue, fault-find, fence, find fault, hedge, mystify, obscure, palter, parry, pettifog, pick holes, pick nits, pick to pieces, prevaricate, pull apart, pull to pieces, pussyfoot, quibble, shift, shuffle, shy, sidestep, split hairs, take exception, tear apart, tear to pieces, tergiversate
Source: Moby Thesaurus, which is part of the
Moby Project created by Grady Ward. In 1996 Grady Ward placed this thesaurus in the public domain.