piddle

It’s exciting as spectacle, but on the substance every element of the preceding sentence is piddling.

There’s even a humbling sequence set in the real Carrara, where, against the quarry’s raw splendor, the mighty modern excavators look as piddling as Hot Wheels on the basement stairs.

Yet on a comparative basis, they are piddling.

Mencken points out that he’s not especially successful, that his business is “petty and piddling,” and to think of him as a leader is completely misguided.

It also would have reduced Hiroshima and Nagasaki to a piddling afterthought; Nolan treats them instead as a profound absence, an indictment by silence.