footling

adj

1. trivial, silly and irritating.

   “He was explaining to her things about the air service. . . . "Isn't it rather dangerous work?" she asked. She felt it was a footling question even as she asked it.”

   “Only a couple of days ago I was compelled to take him off a case because his handling of it was so footling.”

   “For 28 footling days the 58-nation General Assembly had been debating the now-famous U.S. afterthought: to postpone partition and substitute a U.N. trusteeship for Palestine.”

   “They are electrically hauled, and travel at over 70 m.p.h. between stops, but they make five stops at footling little country towns and take two hours for the 98-mile run.”

   ““Why did you persist in writing hurlothrumbo romances of the footling sort favored by mooncalfs?””

verb

1. (form-of, gerund, participle, present)present participle and gerund of footle

noun

1. A fetus oriented so that, at birth, its foot or feet will emerge first. A type of breech birth.

   “In 1999 my fourth child (third daughter) made an unexpected footling breech presentation.”