Etymology

logic-chopping

Today it means: The practice of engaging in excessively subtle, pedantic, or specious argumentation; the use of overly fine or trivial distinctions in reasoning . Full definition →

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The story

From the phrase chop logic, attested from the early 16th century . The element chop originally meant "to bandy, exchange" (as in chop logic, i.e., to exchange logical arguments) . Later chop was wrongly understood as "to cut, split" .

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.