hair-splitting vs nitpicking

hair-splitting

noun
  • the act of finding exceedingly small differences which are probably neither important nor noticeable to most people. 

nitpicking

noun
  • A process of finding or pointing out tiny details or errors, particularly if the pointed-out details seem insignificant or irrelevant to all but the finder. 

  • The painstaking process of removing nits (lice eggs) from someone's hair. 

How often have the words hair-splitting and nitpicking occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )