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What is "hair-splitting"

Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
hair-splitting
noun
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ It is this kind of hair-splitting that gives politics a bad name.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ But this is hair-splitting as an art form.
▪ This is the kind of disingenuous hair-splitting that gives politics a bad name.
▪ This, to those interested in the purpose of the insider-trading law, is lawyers' hair-splitting.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
hair-splitting

"making over-nice distinctions," by 1739, from hair + verbal noun from split (v.). To split hairs "make over-fine distinctions" is first recorded 1650s, as to cut the hair. Hair also being 18c. slang for "female pudendum," hair-splitter was noted in 1811 as slang for "penis."

Wiktionary
hair-splitting

n. (context idiomatic English) the act of finding exceedingly small differences which are probably neither important nor noticeable to most people.

Usage examples of "hair-splitting".

As a piece of hair-splitting it was brilliant, and reconciled many in the Senate to Pompey who were obdurately against a proconsular command going to a man outside the Senate.

Any questioning of the judges, quibbling, hair-splitting, or whining could yield a heavy fine, strippage, ejection, or all three.

And it could also explain why all of the cults, regardless of their superficial bickerings and hair-splittings, are united in calling for JEVEX to be restored.

Never would he have dared to present either of them to the Duchess, conscious instinctively of the air with which she would have listened to Brichot's monologues and Elstir's hair-splittings, the Guermantes spirit regarding pretentious and prolix speech, whether in a serious or a farcical vein, as alike of the most intolerable imbecility.