Nitpicks

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. To excessively criticize minor or trivial details while ignoring larger issues at hand
2. To repeatedly point out insignificant faults or flaws, often missing the bigger picture
3. To overly focus on small, unimportant errors and criticize them harshly

Etymology: A "nit" is the egg of a louse, a word inherited from Old English "hnitu" and related to Dutch "neet" and German "Niss." Getting rid of them meant combing hair strand by strand to pick out eggs that were tiny, pale, and easy to miss, so the job rewarded close, fussy attention. The compound joins that picking with the small, fiddly target. Someone who nitpicks is doing the same painstaking work on trivial matters, hunting for specks that most people would ignore. The image is of a person combing through something for the smallest possible flaw. Its sense of harsh criticism grew out of that fussiness. A nitpicker is not just noticing tiny things but using them to find fault, so the word's meaning shifted from a grooming task to a way of arguing.

Synonyms: quibbles, fusses

Antonyms: overlook, ignore