pettifogger

This is one of those words that sounds comic even while it’s insulting. The first half is harmless enough: petty, from French petit, just means “small,” as in petty cash or a petty officer. The sneaky part is fogger, which seems to have lived in the same neighborhood as cheating merchants and maybe even the famous Fugger banking family of Augsburg, the kind of money-power that made ordinary people suspicious before the word was even born. In other words, a pettifogger is not just a little lawyer; he’s a little shark, the legal equivalent of a man selling you a bent spoon in a dark alley. By the 1560s the term was already loose in English, and the insult still lands because nobody likes a man who makes a mountain out of a molehill for a fee.