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Piffling   Listen
Piffling

adjective
1.
(informal) small and of little importance.  Synonyms: fiddling, footling, lilliputian, little, niggling, petty, picayune, piddling, trivial.  "A footling gesture" , "Our worries are lilliputian compared with those of countries that are at war" , "A little (or small) matter" , "A dispute over niggling details" , "Limited to petty enterprises" , "Piffling efforts" , "Giving a police officer a free meal may be against the law, but it seems to be a picayune infraction"



Piffle

verb
(past & past part. piffled; pres. part. piffling)
1.
Speak (about unimportant matters) rapidly and incessantly.  Synonyms: blab, blabber, chatter, clack, gabble, gibber, maunder, palaver, prate, prattle, tattle, tittle-tattle, twaddle.
2.
Act in a trivial or ineffective way.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Piffling" Quotes from Famous Books



... plant in a month, and we've had to cut our field strength down to a whisper to keep from burning out our accumulators. We can hunt as far as Neptune easy—we can go to Alpha Centauri if we want to. This thing of piffling and monkeying around here's pulling my cork, and for the ten thousand four hundred and sixty seventh time I say let's prowl and prowl now! In fact, I'm getting so sick of sticking around doing nothing that I'm going out anyway, ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith

... baying gets on your nerves, just send for me." He went down the stairs and stepped into the boat. "Remember, Holcombe," he called, "every well-constituted murder has two things: a motive and a corpse. You haven't either, only a mass of piffling details—" ...
— The Case of Jennie Brice • Mary Roberts Rinehart



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