tortuosity

tortuousness; tortuous condition or nature.

Crookedness.

So far from seeking to "pettifogulise"—i.e., to find evasions for any purpose in a trickster's minute tortuosities of construction—exactly in the opposite direction, from mere excess of sincerity, most unwillingly I found, in almost everybody's words, an unintentional opening left for double interpretations.

A property of curve being tortuous, commonly used to describe diffusion in porous media.