picayune

/pɪkəˈyun/

The adjective picayune refers to those things that are so small, trivial, and unimportant that they're not worth getting into. Why focus on the picayune details, when it's the larger ideas that are the real problem?

There are several newspapers in America called the Picayune, because they see it as their job to comb through even the minor details of the story to get to the truth. Hear the word "picky" in picayune (though they're not related)? That's one way to remember it. A picky person is picayune. Airline disaster investigators spend their lives rummaging through the debris, knowing that it might be the most picayune detail that leads them to understand the cause of a crash.

Definitions of picayune

1. adjective

   (informal) small and of little importance
   “giving a police officer a free meal may be against the law, but it seems to be a picayune infraction”

   synonyms: fiddling, footling, lilliputian, little, niggling, petty, piddling, piffling, trivial

   unimportant

   not important