caviller

"What," we asked ourselves, "is the common ground that we might all share?" Our love of tweed and port seemed too thin in itself, but, I believe, was a clue towards a SOON, DOUBT, MISANTHROPES CLUB GATHERING ROUND PUB TELLY WATCH CELEBRITY', ,,,, THAT PEERLESS SHOWCASE ALL FAILINGS personal world view that has its origins in an antipathy for the conventions and mores of recent times that is seen as perverse by some (if not many) and has led to accusations of being a certain type of individual; a carper, caviller, egoist, pessimist, flouter, misogamist, mocker.

"[Cleanthes:] And a caviller might raise all the same objections to the Copernican system, which you have urged against my reasonings.

When he considers whether he had any right to bind Jane Fairfax in a secret engagement, he writes breezily: "'For my temptation to think it a right, I refer every caviller to a brick house ...

Sir Aubrey, whose name had been inscribed on one of the massive oaken coffins in the family Perriam vault, whose pompous Latin epitaph, with an error in an ablative case--when was there a Latin epitaph without an erroneous termination of substantive or adjective, according to some learned caviller?--adorned the chapel wall.

Born with the Blarney Stone in his mouth he courts controversy wherever he goes and, in one of the most cut-throat sectors in civil aviation, his swashbuckling, caviller attitude angers morepeople than it impresses.

In it Green accused Colenso of proposing "by arithmetic to overthrow the Mosaic record" and of building his case on "a few superficial difficulties in the sacred record." He denounced Colenso as a mere "caviller" suffering from a "disordered brain" and an "utter incapacity to deal with the questions which he professes to handle." He ridiculed Colenso for making an astronomical error that no "schoolboy" would make (but in so doing, he committed one himself, as he reluctantly confessed in a note hurriedly added before publication).