It's Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for July 29th.

Today's word is quibble, spelled Q-U-I-B-B-L-E. Quibble is a verb. To quibble is to argue or complain about small unimportant things. Quibble can also mean to evade

the point of an argument by making trivial or frivolous objections. Here's the word used in a sentence by

Ruth Franklin from her introduction to The Lottery and Other Dark Tales by Shirley Jackson.

In Louisa, please come home, one of Jackson's

most deeply affecting stories, a girl on the cusp of womanhood runs away from home and disappears

into a new life in a new city, where she finds a room in a boarding house and a job in a

stationary store. Jackson's agent, who judged it a

powerful and brilliant horror story, quibbled with her decision to leave the character's motive

unexplained, but it's clear that Louisa doesn't need a reason to run away. She simply wants to

disappear. There's not much to quibble about when it comes to the origins of the verb quibble.

It followed the noun quibble, meaning an evasion of or shift from the point, and a minor

objection or criticism into the language in the mid-17th century. That word is likely a diminutive

of a now obsolete noun quib, also referring to an evasion of

or shift from the point. Quib, in turn, likely comes from a form of the Latin word qui, meaning who,

that is also a distant relation of our word who. With your word of the day, I'm Peter Sokolowski.

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