1951 Charleston (W. Virginia) Daily Mail 21 Dec. 10/2 Sen. Johnson is encouraged to proceed with his nit picking.

1956 Time 16 Jan. 17 ‘No nit-picking,’ Vice President Nixon adjured his colleagues, but the Cabinet eventually sent out to the President a file of verbatim reaction that piled 1½ inches high.

1964 Jrnl. Finance 19 385 One can either engage in knit-picking over his interpretation of some of these trends, or [etc.].

1968 Listener 4 July 22/1 Knox's essay was a stylistic send-up of German apparatus criticus nit-picking in the Bible and the classics.

2003 J. Blase Breaking Silence iii. 53 Teachers were also subjected to mistreatment with regard to work standards (i.e., nitpicking) and unreasonable work demands (i.e., overloading).

1948 Spectator 14 May 580/2 There were angry speeches, there were boring speeches,..there were what soldiers call nit-picking speeches. (‘And I turn now to the semi-colon in line 14 on page 2 of the draft amendment.’)

1961 Jrnl. Polit. 23 693 The appropriations group is not regarded simply as a pack of nit-picking accountants, as a recent unfortunate discussion..appears to indicate.

1970 P. St. Pierre Chilcotin Holiday 93 Let us bring it down to the point where no nitpicking critic can disagree.

2001 Courier (Dundee) (Electronic ed.) 3 May It is becoming unfashionable to control..feelings of anger when nitpicking officialdom gets under the skin.