The Wit’s Guide to Pettifoggery

Or, quibbles and nits

Counsel for the Defense (The Advocate), Honoré Daumier, c. 1862-65, but the exact date is a meaningless detail, n’est-ce pas?

What better way of obscuring a big obvious truth than with a series of petty fogs? Hence the pettifogger, an unscrupulous character who lives to drown you in distracting details. More often than not, he is a lawyer. Objection? Overruled! But can’t the fogger be female? No, because to produce fog he has to be a mister.

“Lawyers spend a great deal of their time shoveling smoke.”
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr,

Let’s not get lost in the weeds? On the contrary, the pettifogger will send you straight into the swamp knowing full well that it’s duck hunting season. The original pettifoggers were the Fuggers, a 15th century Bavarian banking family who at one point owned the better part* of Europe (*the part with the castles.) They made money by selling indulgences and their surname fittingly became synonymous with screwing people over. And so their smaller, poorer heirs became pettier facsimiles of the original. I assume all this was covered in the feature film Meet the Fokkers, but I confess I’ve yet to see it.

“A trifle consoles us because a trifle upsets us.”
— Blaise Pascal

The pettifogger will send you down a rabbit hole, then stick a fire hose into said rabbit hole. This is an occasionally successful legal strategy, which is how the word came to denote a second-rate attorney “condemned by their inadequacies to dealing only in minor cases,” as per Jonathon Green’s Dictionary of Slang. To call someone out for pettifogging used to be an objectionable insult, but now that everyone does it, we barely need the word. Nickel and diming our opponents is the coin of the realm.

“They were evidently small men, all wind and quibbles, flinging out their chuffy grain to us with far less interest than a farm-wife feels as she scatters corn to her fowls.”
— D.H. Lawrence

The pettifogger wants you to get wrapped around the axle, all the better to run you over. The reason it works so well is that we love trivia, especially as a way to avoid facing larger issues. And that brings us back to the legal basis of pettifogging, specifically Parkinson’s Law of Trivia, which states that the time spent on any item is inversely proportional to its importance.

“In larger things we are convivial; what causes trouble is the trivial.”
— Richard Armour

C. Northcote Parkinson, my personal hero, was a naval historian turned bestselling business author entirely on the strength of a dry joke made in The Economist that all tasks expand to fill the time allotted to them. His resulting book The Pursuit of Progress describes an important meeting called to approve the commissioning of a nuclear reactor. The problem is that few of the attendees understand the subject, and “it is too late to query that reactor scheme, but they would like to demonstrate, before the meeting ends, that they are alive to all that is going on.” And so when they get to the insignificant ‘Item Ten: Bicycle shed for the use of clerical staff,’ everyone chimes in with a strong opinion.

“The man who is denied the opportunity of taking decisions of importance begins to regard as important the decisions he is allowed to take.”
— C. Northcote Parkinson

Ergo, pettifogging is weaponized bikeshedding. The pettifogger knows the human brain loves an irrelevant, easily understood digression and offers up chicanery by the barrelful. You don’t need an atmospheric scientist to know that when you accumulate enough petty fogs, you get a haze so thick you can’t find the bicycle shed, if they even built one.

“I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.”
— Jack Kerouac

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The January Riposte Card is by Pierre-Paul Pariseau, a Montreal artist whose surreal collages fit the tenor of the times. To receive his psychedelically profound postcard in the mail from me, upgrade your subscription below. And here are P3’s answers to the Riposte Card Questionnaire:

What’s your go-to item in a well-stocked stationery store?
A notebook.

Where do you go for inspiration and/or information?
Books, I’m a big reader…. And a bit of the Internet.

Is there one joke, witticism, or aphorism you live by?
Let’s look in my current notebook. The choice is very difficult. Let’s take that recent one I noted : “I have never thought of it as a career, but only as a destiny.” Unfortunately I have not written where that sentence comes from, which is rare.

What’s the best thing to put on toast?
Honey and bananas.

What work are you most proud of, and how can people support it?
To have survived as an artist, an illustrator.

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“Little things affect little minds.”
— Benjamin Disraeli

On being told she was very outspoken, Dorothy Parker is said to have responded, “Outspoken by whom?” Which I can’t believe I hadn’t heard until this week. And the promise that there are still gems to be uncovered in my library of quotation books is why we keep on keeping on!

Issue No. 290 of Get Wit Quick was packed with only the most relevant details. A significant portion of my readers are lawyers, as shown in Exhibit A, GWQ Issue No. 109. The newsletter mascot is Magnus the Magpie, an intelligent bird who collects shiny things and who stole his name from the magician in Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck that will have you wondering, “Is subtle funk even funkier?” The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. Ipso facto, please tap the ❤️ below.