Who is a petty person?

I have heard this term applied to a variety of people. But I had never paid much attention to it. I always thought of it as a demeaning term used when one is super-disgusted with someone, as the user almost always expressed it in that manner.

Until…today.

I looked it up on the almighty Merriam. It didn’t have the term, but it did have the meaning for petty. Three of them:

1. having secondary rank or importance
2. having little or no importance or significance
3. marked by or reflective of narrow interests and sympathies: SMALL-MINDED.

While petty is used in a wide variety of cases, it didn’t take long to figure out that the ‘petty’ I was looking for had to be the 3rd one.

The 1st didn’t seem so demeaning as it turns out, it is used for officers and states that are not highly ranked — Not at all demeaning. Just not up there! If anything, it seemed a relatively respectable term. There is no way it could have been used for insulting people.

The 2nd too didn’t sound too demeaning for me. Just as the 1st, it’s just about not being up there. Used in insult context, if anything, it sounds more of an emotional outpour at the person: You hurt me, you are petty. Not at all an insult!

It fits well with petty-cash.

The 3rd seemed plausible. Especially the term in CAPS — SMALL MINDED. Now that’s demeaning, an insult! Who doesn’t want a great mind? Who doesn’t want a great heart? Who would want to be called someone with an inability to think and do big! Money and ranks are stuff that come with the capacity of mind. Who would want to have ‘small’ of the very thing that makes us humans? It would be like telling a lion you are small-clawed. But still, what does it mean to be small minded?

I decided to venture. So, what is small minded?

This is what the dictionary had to say:

1. having narrow interests, sympathies or outlook
2. typical of a small-minded person: marked by pettiness, narrowness or meanness.

Since the descriptions were very redundant, I cut around, took commons, grouped around and came up with this:

narrow and mean sympathy and outlook.

One level later:

narrow feelings and point-of-view (I thought mean could be defined by narrow itself)

One more level later:

narrow feelings and standpoint

.

.

narrow view.

Now, the only task left was to understand what narrow meant when used against people:

I found the following terms — illiberal, prejudiced, stingy, niggardly.

As I went through all these terms, I kept running in circles. The same words were used for each-other.

Then I decided to view synonyms of each and take the common terms. A few minutes later:

bigoted, low, rude, vulgar, intolerant, scanty, cheap, ungenerous, miserly.

What I noticed was the 9 terms above could be categorized into two groups:

1. On the basis of character and behavior- bigoted, low, rude, vulgar, intolerant
2. On the basis of resources- scanty, cheap, ungenerous, miserly.

∴ A petty person is someone who thinks, feels, desires and behaves the lowest and gives away the least.

What could that mean?