Pettifoggery Bottom

"I know theim verie well," William Bullein wrote in the late 16th century; "they are two Pettifoggers in the Lawe." Pettifoggery has come to mean legal chicanery, and last week a Senate subcommittee consultant used the word to describe a weakness of U.S. negotiators in dealing with Communist powers. Dr. Fred Charles Ikle, head of social science at the Rand Corp., argued that U.S. diplomats tend to get lost in tactical detail unrelated to their basic aims. He added: "A great many capable officials are then forced to labor intensively on these details like pettifogging lawyers." Dr. Ikle also observed that American negotiators give "excessive attention to ephemeral rhetoric," often "succumbing to semantic infiltration."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.