captiously


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cap·tious

 (kăp′shəs)
adj.
1. Marked by a disposition to find and point out trivial faults: a captious scholar.
2. Intended to entrap or confuse, as in an argument: a captious question.
[Middle English capcious, from Old French captieux, from Latin captiōsus, from captiō, seizure, sophism, from captus, past participle of capere, to seize; see kap- in Indo-European roots.]
cap′tious·ly adv.
cap′tious·ness n.
ThesaurusAntonymsRelated WordsSynonymsLegend:
Adv.1.captiously - in a captious, carping manner; "he was captiously pedantic"
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References in classic literature ?
We are not boy and girl, to be captiously irritable, misled by every moment's inadvertence, and wantonly playing with our own happiness.
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In his last book, The Long Detour (which I reviewed captiously, I now admit with some remorse), he upheld "socialist principles in the Post-Industrial Era," and he called for a "worldwide program of demilitarization, led by the United States.
Uncle Jimmy Weinstein
Already "blinded with the veil of jealousy," as the narrator in La Prima Parte de le Novelle del Bandello captiously remarks of his protagonist, Timbreo, (22) the deceived lovers in these narratives find a correlative for their blindness in the opacity of narrative itself, in its ability to filter data and conceal under the very pretext of revealing, whetting the lover's voyeurism while impairing his physical--and intellectual--sight.
Deforming sources: literary antecedents and their traces in Much Ado About Nothing

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