Pissant vs Passant - What's the difference?
pissant | passant |
(dated, outside, dialects) An ant.
(pejorative) An insignificant person.
(pejorative) A person who adheres strictly to a rule or policy despite current circumstances.
(pejorative) A person seemingly incapable of focusing on anything but the trivial, especially in the sense of trivial or irrelevant criticism.
(heraldry, of a four-legged animal) Walking, usually to the right, and looking straight ahead with the right forepaw raised from the ground.
* , III.i:
(obsolete) Currently in use; in vogue.
* 1646 , Sir Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica , III.7:
As nouns the difference between pissant and passant
is that pissant is (dated|outside|dialects) an ant while passant is passer-by.As an adjective pissant
is insignificant or unimportant.pissant
English
Noun
(en noun)- Their super is a real pissant about break times.
Quotations
* 2005 January 31, The New Yorker , 24: *: “Everyone is saying, ‘You can’t be serious about targeting Iran. Look at Iraq,’” the former intelligence official told me. “But they say, ‘We’ve got some lessons learned—not militarily, but how we did it politically. We’re not going to rely on agency pissants .’ No loose ends, and that’s why the C.I.A. is out of there.” * 1993 , PJ O'Rourke, Democracy in its diapers'' in ''Give war a chance (Picador): *: It is the beauty of well designed fascism that it gives every piss-ant an ant hill to piss from.Anagrams
* * ----passant
English
Alternative forms
* passaunt (obsolete)Adjective
(-)- He them espying, gan himselfe prepare, / And on his arme addresse his goodly shield / That bore a Lion passant in a golden field.
- Many opinions are passant concerning the basilisk, or little king of serpents, commonly called the cockatrice [...].