Sentence examples for somewhat petty from inspiring English sources

He simply drew on the precedents of generations of officials whose policy against the Central Asian tribes had been to play them off against each other and to whom commercial considerations were somewhat petty matters; he did not comprehend the significance of the British demands for free trade and international equality, which were based on their concept of a commercial empire.

After a tough series of questions during a debate — also on the issue of immigration — at which Hillary Rodham Clinton appeared as rattled as she had been up to that point in the race, her campaign released a series of somewhat petty attacks on Barack Obama, who trailed her by roughly the same margin in the polls that Mr. Perry now trails Mr. Romney.

The writing of poetry is regularly deemed a dead art, so it is little wonder that its living practitioners are a somewhat petty and xenophobic bunch -- or that the enterprise itself has come to seem, except in the hands of a few populist types like Sharon Olds, Philip Levine and Billy Collins, almost willfully insular.

His gripes with the media can seem somewhat petty.

Although this argument might sound somewhat petty on first hearing, there is some logic in it.

That kind of impresses me and kind of makes me wish that we'd cut out "Bitten" and "Heartache" and kept the momentum of the first two episodes going, but "Supernatural" has always alternated between standalone stories and serialized arcs throughout the year, so it seems like a somewhat petty complaint.

"It was pretty petty".

Greg Hicks, though, finds a streak of grim camp comedy in Caesar's here somewhat arch and petty-seeming attempts to conceal encroaching frailty behind a grandiose public image.

After a day obsessing about my social media performance, I felt vain, petty, and somewhat powerless in the face of this app that had somehow infiltrated its way into my psyche.

Andrew Garfield, pre-Spiderman days, represented Eduardo Saverin in a way that made the man look petty, naive, and somewhat of a lackey to Zuckerberg.

So, petty thieves looking to fence a laptop may be somewhat dissuaded from picking up a computer covered in stickers.