修之路·烨天

word of the day- -

                                      

captious • adjective
1 : marked by an often ill-natured inclination to stress faults and raise objections
*2 : calculated to confuse, entrap, or entangle in argument

Example sentence:
The teacher often deliberately asked captious questions to get the students debating.

Did you know?
If you suspect that "captious" is a relative of "capture" and "captivate," you're right. All of those words are related to the Latin verb "capere," which means "to take." "Captious" actually comes from "captio," a Latin offspring of "capere," which literally means "a taking" but which was also used to mean "a deception" or "a sophistic argument." Arguments labeled "captious" are likely to capture you in a figurative sense; they often entrap through subtly deceptive reasoning or trifling points. A captious individual is one who you might also dub "hypercritical," the sort of carping, censorious critic only too ready to point out minor faults or raise objections on trivial grounds.

- 作者： kingdark 访问统计：　2005年08月15日, 星期一 13:18 加入博采