quillet \KWIL-it\, noun:
a subtlety or quibble.
Some points involved in the discussion of the question under consideration suggest legal quillets, and exercises in scholastic logic, of a kind in which Aquinas and his brother schoolmen, writers of patristic and mediaeval divinity, would have fairly reveled.
-- Edited by Sir Frederick Pollock, The Law Quarterly Review, 1894
O! some authority how to proceed; Some tricks, some quillets, how to cheat the devil.
-- William Shakespeare, Love's Labour's Lost, 1598
Quillet is related to the word quiddity meaning "a trifling nicety."
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