trifle

An English dessert made from a mixture of thick custard, fruit, sponge cake, jelly and whipped cream.

It is interesting to watch the surface joviality on screen while racism is layered between courses like soggy trifles.

Anything that is of little importance or worth.

Trifles light as air / Are to the jealous confirmation strong / As proofs of holy writ.

Olde Chaucer doth of Topas tell, / Mad Rablais of Pantagruell, / A latter third of Dowsabell, / With such poore trifles playing:

Anything that is of little importance or worth.

A trifle, some eight-penny matter.

He told her of horses which he had bought for a trifle and sold for incredible sums […]

A very small amount (of something).

This Line leaves out […] Poplar and Black-vvall, vvhich are indeed contiguous, a Trifle of Ground excepted, and very populous.

There was a good deal of rustling and whispering behind the curtain, a trifle of lamp smoke, and an occasional giggle from Amy […]

A particular kind of pewter.

To deal with something as if it were of little importance or worth.

You must not trifle with her affections.

[…] Do not believe / That, from the sense of all civility, / I thus would play and trifle with your reverence:

To act, speak, or otherwise behave with jest.

[…] playing and trifling are completely banished out of my mind […]

But he was terribly roused too and bound to go on; he wasn’t just trifling but intended something.

To inconsequentially toy with something.

Mr. Micawber, leaning back in his chair, trifled with his eye-glass and cast his eyes up at the ceiling […]

She sat in a café, trifling with her coffee spoon.

To squander or waste.

We trifle time: I pray thee, pursue sentence.

For an honest and sober man will rather make that woman his wife, whom he seeth employed continually about her business, than one who makes it her business to trifle away her own and others time.

To make a trifle of, to make trivial.

[…] but this sore night / Hath trifled former knowings.