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From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.44 [gcide]:
Captious \Cap"tious\, adjective [F. captieux, L. captiosus. See {Caption}.]
1. Apt to catch at faults; disposed to find fault or to cavil; eager to object; difficult to please.
A captious and suspicious age. --Stillingfleet.
I am sensible I have not disposed my materials to abide the test of a captious controversy. --Bwike.
2. Fitted to harass, perplex, or insnare; insidious; troublesome.
Captious restraints on navigation. --Bancroft.
Syn: Caviling, carping, fault-finding; censorious; hypercritical; peevish, fretful; perverse; troublesome.
Usage: {Captious}, {caviling}, {Carping}. A captious person is one who has a fault-finding habit or manner, or is disposed to catch at faults, errors, etc., with quarrelsome intent; a caviling person is disposed to raise objections on frivolous grounds; carping implies that one is given to ill-natured, persistent, or unreasonable fault-finding, or picking up of the words or actions of others.
Caviling is the carping of argument, carping the caviling of ill temper. --C. J. Smith.
From WordNet (r) 2.0 [wn]:
captious
adjective: tending to find and call attention to faults; "a captious pedant"; "an excessively demanding and faultfinding tutor" [syn: {faultfinding}]
From Moby Thesaurus II by Grady Ward, 1.0 [moby-thes]:
43 Moby Thesaurus words for "captious": bickering, carping, caviling, censorious, choplogic, contrary, critic, critical, cynical, demanding, equivocatory, evasive, exacting, faultfinding, finicky, hairsplitting, hedging, hypercritical, irritable, logic-chopping, nagging, niggling, nit-picking, overcritical, paltering, particular, peevish, pernickety, perverse, pettifogging, petty, petulant, picayune, pussyfooting, quibbling, shuffling, snappish, snappy, testy, trichoschistic, trifling, trivial, ultracritical
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Definitions retrieved from local copies of the freely distributed DICT client/server software and databases. Click here for database copyright information. - KM |