word-catching

When I have more leisure for _word-catching_, should you have space, I may furnish a few more.

Notes and Queries, Number 16, February 16, 1850 Various

Any criticism of an edition of Shakspeare must necessarily concern itself with seemingly insignificant matters, often with a comma or a syllable, -- and the danger is always of degenerating into a captiousness and word-catching unworthy the lover of truth for its own sake.

The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 03, No. 16, February, 1859 Various

Converse with a mind that is grandly simple, and literature looks like word-catching.

VIII. Essays. The Over-Soul. 1841 1909

I believe that you mean (and you must not suppose that I am word-catching), if you allow that the one is superior to the ten thousand?

Gorgias 427? BC-347? BC Plato 1855

Converse with a mind that is grandly simple, and literature looks like word-catching.

Essays — First Series Ralph Waldo Emerson 1842

Converse with a mind that is grandly simple, and literature looks like word-catching.

Essays: First Series (1841) 1841

He believes that modern literature should wear the fetters of classical antiquity; that truth is to be weighed in the scales of opinion and prejudice; that power is equivalent to right; that genius is dependent on rules; that taste and refinement of language consist in _word-catching_.

The Spirit of the Age Contemporary Portraits William Hazlitt 1804

Dr Johnson has assailed them in his worst style of captious and word-catching criticism.

Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes Thomas Parnell 1698

The evil of mere verbal oppositions, the requirement of an impossible accuracy in the use of terms, the error of supposing that philosophy was to be found in language, the danger of word-catching, have frequently been discussed by him in the previous dialogues, but nowhere has the spirit of modern inductive philosophy been more happily indicated than in the words of the Statesman: — ‘If you think more about things, and less about words, you will be richer in wisdom as you grow older.’

The Statesman 2006