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Today's Word "quibble"

To raise petty questions on

Published in Vocabulary

quibble \kwi-bl\ (verb) - To raise petty questions, to hesitate or argue over trivial issues, to cavil.

"Always one to quibble, Ivan would tend to cause club meetings to run hours longer than necessary while he debated petty minutiae that concerned no one and mattered even less."

 

Just as a dribble is a small drip, and a nibble is a small nip, a quibble was originally a small quip in the sense of a petty remark or jibe. "Quibble," then, was a diminutive whose meaning changed as diminutives eroded from English. From Latin qui, quibus (Dative-Ablative Plural) "who, which," a word often found in legal documents where quibbling is a fine art. "Qui" comes from Proto-Indo-European *kwo- with various endings. In the Germanic languages, the initial [k] regularly became [h], giving us "who," "where" [hwer], "why" [hwI], "whether," among others. In the Slavic languages the *kw reduced to a simple [k], to which accrued various suffixes, resulting in pronouns like kto "who," kogda "when," kuda "where" in Russian and other languages.


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