finical /FIN-ə-kəl/ adjective. Overly particular; excessively fastidious. In architecture: inordinately delicate and detailed. Likely derived from fine, possibly from Dutch fijnkens (accurately, neatly).
“While he ate, which he did with the finical niceness of an aged and dyspeptic gourmet on the umpteenth course of an imperial banquet, he would glance up at me now and then with a speculative and, so it seemed, drily amused expression.” (John Banville)
“Time was when I was thought entitled to respect. But now, debauched by this Frenchified rascal, they call me rude, surly, a tyrant! It is true that I cannot talk in finical phrases, flatter people with hypocritical praise, or suppress the real feelings of my mind. The scoundrel knows his pitiful advantages, and insults me upon them without ceasing.” (William Godwin)
“Now, the wry Rosenbloom is dead
And his finical carriers tread”
(Wallace Stevens)
“Be it mine once more the maunderings to trace
Of the expounders’ self-directed race—
Their wire-drawn fancies, finically fine,
Of diligent vacuity the sign.”
(Ambrose Bierce)
“The knowledge enshrined here is most luminous; but the extravagance is wearying, an outrage to God and man, especially when set amidst so pious a town, where the most finical youth buys his fopperies in brown and gray…” (M.T. Anderson)
“Scrupulous to the last, finical to a fault, that’s Malone, all over.” (Samuel Beckett)
“Whereas, some merchant ships crossing each other’s wake in the mid-Atlantic, will oftentimes pass on without so much as a single word of recognition, mutually cutting each other on the high seas, like a brace of dandies in Broadway; and all the time indulging, perhaps, in finical criticism upon each other’s rig.” (Herman Melville)
“Now, mark you, I was devilish sharp set. I was in no mood to quibble about trifles: I was not, shall we say, in a finical mood.” (Philip Larkin)
“For about two-thirds of the poem the restraining, self-abnegating, completely attentive manners of the writing keep us alive to the surfaces of a world: the note is colloquial if tending towards the finical, the scenery is chaste, beloved and ancestral.” (Seamus Heaney)
Select Synonyms: foppish, finical, perjink.
Elsewhere: Wordnik.