pissant

noun

1. An ant.
2. (derogatory, slang)An insignificant person.

   “It is the beauty of well designed fascism that it gives every piss-ant an ant hill to piss from.”

   ““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.””

3. (derogatory, slang)A person who adheres strictly to a rule or policy despite current circumstances.

   “Their manager is a real pissant about break times.”

4. (derogatory, slang)A person seemingly incapable of focusing on anything but the trivial, especially in the sense of trivial or irrelevant criticism.

adj

1. (sometimes, vulgar)Insignificant or unimportant.

   “This is our chance to make a name for ourselves; to show that we're not just some piss-ant white-bread mountain town.”

   “A homosexual is somebody who, in 15 years of trying cannot get a pissant anti-discrimination bill through the city council.”

   “‘He was just this little pissant kid, Wallace.’”