Nitpicking - Wikipedia Nitpicking For other uses, see Nitpicking ( disambiguation ). This article does not cite any sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. ( December 2009 ) Photograph by Giorgio Sommer ( 1834 -- 1914 ) ; Famille napolitaine -- a Neapolitan mother searching for lice in her son 's hair. Nitpicking is the act of removing nits ( the eggs of lice, generally head lice ) from the host 's hair. As the nits are cemented to individual hairs, they can not be removed with most lice combs and, before modern chemical methods were invented, the only options were to shave all the host 's hair or to pick them free one by one. This is a slow and laborious process, as the root of each individual hair must be examined for infestation. It was largely abandoned as modern chemical methods became available ; however, as lice populations can and do develop resistance, manual nitpicking is still often necessary. Metaphor As nitpicking inherently requires fastidious, meticulous attention to detail, the term has become appropriated to describe the practice of meticulously searching for minor, even trivial errors in detail ( often referred to as `` nits '' as well ). Thus `` nitpicking '' may be a pejorative term for troubleshooting, proofreading or similar, whose excess could be a psychopathologic form of criticising, see hypercriticism. See also Self care Treatment of human head lice Human lice and pediculosis Species Head louse Crab louse Body louse Infestation Pediculosis Pediculosis corporis Phthiriasis Treatment Nitpicking Pediculicide Lindane Permethrin Phenothrin Delphinium Other terms of interest Cooties Sucking louse Louse This medical treatment -- related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. Retrieved from `` https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nitpicking&oldid=742307240 '' Categories : Hygiene Medical treatment stubs Hidden categories : Articles lacking sources from December 2009 All articles lacking sources All stub articles Talk About Wikipedia Boarisch Dansk Deutsch Basa Jawa Nederlands Edit links This page was last edited on 2 October 2016, at 23 : 11. About Wikipedia

Question: where did the term nit picking come from
Answer: the act of removing nits (the eggs of lice, generally head lice) from the host's hair