What is "carping"

Usage examples of "carping".

The Aston Martin is a magnificent machine but not particularly renowned for the quietness of its engine: there were carping critics who occasionally maintained that the engines for the David Brown tractor division found their way into the wrong machines.

I can hardly hear my own thoughtspicking, carping, criticizing, arguingoh, Titus, how they argue!

Cicero, calling on them, found Servilia convinced that she still possessed enough power in the Senate to have the decision reversed, Cassius in the mood for war, Brutus utterly despondent, Porcia carping and nagging as usual, and Tertulla in the depths of despair because she had lost her baby.

Back in the borough Reise had treated her and Cashel exactly as he treated anyone else: with brusque, carping honesty.

By an able but carping critic it was alleged that the mere chemical analysis of old-fashioned Herbal Simples makes their medicinal actions no less empirical than before: and that a pedantic knowledge of their constituent parts, invested with fine technical names, gives them no more scientific a position than that which our fathers understood.

Then twenty-two years ago, after nearly twenty years of ill-tempered confrontation with his fellow theorists, he had, with characteristic abruptness, resigned from his position at Cambridge and retreated to Launde Abbey to pursue his theories without carping interference from lesser minds, his brilliance and loud vocal intolerance of the dry, crusty world endemic to academia creating a media legend of Bohemian eccentricity in the process.

Adam's constant carping, he recruited the services of a very serious-faced domestic.

He hoped the biker had some action lined up for them, because Haven really needed to kill something, preferably supernatural, if only to shut up his own carping inner demon.

All around me, I repeat, I seem to hear the angry murmur of carpers cavilling and cavillers carping.

Our tongues find it succulent even while our ears hear the hungry carpings of our critics.

He wished it were someone else's turn to represent the Village Council, Haral Luhhan or Jon Thane or Samel Crawe, or anybody but Cenn with his carping.

Inured to the discomforts and the perils of the sea, she badgered the sailhands until they laughed, and put red pepper in the cook's jerky so he would stop carping about the fact that his food was never hot.

Jefferson once said people get pretty much the kind of government they deserve, which is why I refuse to listen to any bullshit carping by my fellow Californians about Reagan and his gubernatorial gang-banging--what I chose to call government by artificial insemination when I was arguing with Julie, a registered Republican, when we weren't making love--because it seems to me they got just what they were asking for.

Even where he sat, six floors up, the tinny, carping voice reached his middle ear.

Some of the more closed-minded Miss World participants were already carping about the upcoming stoning of a Nigerian woman, in accordance with Islamic Sharia law.