What's the difference between apocryphal and dubious?

Apocryphal


Definition:

  • (a.) Pertaining to the Apocrypha.
  • (a.) Not canonical. Hence: Of doubtful authority; equivocal; mythic; fictitious; spurious; false.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) It's said that she and her ladies appeared on the battlements, dusting the places where the enemies' stones had fallen – though that particular story may be as apocryphal as the events in this film.
  • (2) The story, he later admitted to Lord Justice Leveson, was apocryphal.
  • (3) One apocryphal story about The Hangover was that it was based on the stag night of Choke producer Tripp Vinson , who supposedly went awol from his own party.
  • (4) There's a story, possibly apocryphal, about Bennett in which he says: "It's funny that people think I'm so nice, I'm actually a bit of a cunt."
  • (5) Released in 1997, it’s also apocryphally known as the most returned video game of all time; players were reportedly lured in by the visuals then repelled by the mysteries of the Japanese role-playing genre.
  • (6) The following is possibly apocryphal, but when the legend becomes fact, print the legend.
  • (7) There is a story, possibly apocryphal, that the imposition of the first Plantagenet prince of Wales was a trick.
  • (8) You know how many times I’d get a call from girlfriends saying, ‘I just got kicked out of a camp, come pick me up?’” In the US press, the gender imbalance in Williston initially attracted as much attention as the population boom, with apocryphal tales of strippers earning $2,500 a night in tips (though the $500 per night reputed to be more accurate is nothing to sniff at).
  • (9) To his fans, though, he's rap's Wolf Of Wall Street, someone who weaves apocryphal tales of an ostentatious lifestyle and encourages them to go and get it for themselves.
  • (10) Just like the apocryphal shrinking Pizza Express pizza, British houses have been getting smaller.
  • (11) Everyone has at least one ridiculous story and it is impossible to tell which are true and which apocryphal.
  • (12) Using biblical and biblical-apocryphal sources, the characteristics of Jewish-Christian patriarchism are shown which as a system, especially embodied by elderly men, was very efficient up to the beginning of the 19th century.
  • (13) This is the first, and probably the most popular, of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County stories, a short, dark and compelling novel set in what he called “my apocryphal county”, a fictional rendering of Lafayette County in his native Mississippi.
  • (14) John Oliver continued his criticism of president Trump, focusing on his domination of the news cycle by making apocryphal statements , saying: “You can’t avoid talking about him.” “Trump dominates the news cycle like a fart dominates the interior of a Volkswagen Beetle,” he said at the start of his Sunday night show.
  • (15) Consider some of the ego-centric stories – most infamously, the pants-down motivational speech in the Bayern dressing-room, which feels apocryphal but is true – and the line appears blurred, to say the least.
  • (16) There is, of course, the famous and possibly apocryphal line , attributed to Ford while shooting the original films and aimed at Lucas: "George, you can type this shit, but you sure can't say it."
  • (17) They are victims of circumstances and forces much more powerful, immoral and brutal than the apocryphal “bad man with a gun” who can be stopped by a “good man” with the same.
  • (18) However, this remark would appear to be apocryphal.
  • (19) The tale may be apocryphal, but when the wily French statesman Talleyrand died in 1838, the no less wily Austrian chancellor Metternich’s response is said to have been : “I wonder what he meant by that?” These days it is getting to be a bit like this with George Osborne .
  • (20) This reflects the narrative of most actual papal elections – these stories tend to be a serious exploration of what is supposed to be a famously apocryphal question: is the pope a Catholic?

Dubious


Definition:

  • (a.) Doubtful or not settled in opinion; being in doubt; wavering or fluctuating; undetermined.
  • (a.) Occasioning doubt; not clear, or obvious; equivocal; questionable; doubtful; as, a dubious answer.
  • (a.) Of uncertain event or issue; as, in dubious battle.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) It’s impossible to automate fully the process of separating truth from falsehood, and it’s dubious to cede such control to for-profit media giants.
  • (2) The draw was enough to take England to the finals in Japan, where Beckham exorcised the demons of four years earlier by scoring the only goal (a dubiously awarded penalty) in the defeat of Argentina.
  • (3) But Blair's address - "history will forgive us" - was a dubious exercise in group therapy: the cheers smacked of pathetic gratitude, as he piously pardoned the legislators, as well as himself, for the catastrophe of Iraq.
  • (4) I drive past buildings that I know, or assume, to house bedsits, their stucco peeling like eczema, their window frames rattling like old bones, and I cannot help myself from picturing the scene within: a dubious pot on an equally dubious single ring, the female in charge of it half-heartedly stirring its contents at the same time as she files her nails, reads an old Vogue, or chats to some distant parent on the telephone.
  • (5) A dubious pattern is emerging of donations through front companies.
  • (6) The relationship of this metabolic aberration to the production of headache still remains dubious for various reasons.
  • (7) During his stints in the Bush and Obama administration Comey has continually taken authoritarian and factually dubious public stances both at odds with responsible public policy and sometimes the law.
  • (8) Today the overestimation of human understanding is reflected in a dogmatic adherence to specific professional or idealogically biased doctrines and in the dubious ideal of a purely empirical science with its limited applicability to mankind.
  • (9) It seems clear that even as we buy cheap clothes with dubious provenance, from an ethical standpoint, people want to do better.
  • (10) Their mechanism is dubious: swelling of mitochondria and intracellular lipidosis, which could signify cellular hypoxia, are rarely present.
  • (11) Imprecise definitions of these complications of necrotizing pancreatitis make inter-institutional comparisons of previously identified data dubious.
  • (12) Critics say this is part of a broader, dubious attempt to appease the Kremlin and boost bilateral trade.
  • (13) In his attempt to justify the unjustifiable, Mr Grieve has clutched at a fragile constitutional doctrine and adopted a deeply dubious legal course.
  • (14) Exporting what appear to be educational success stories is a dubious enterprise, because it is so easy to misread how another country's system works and to discount its cultural background.
  • (15) Observed retrospectively, in some cases death was the result of dubious indication.
  • (16) The Guardian’s own readers’ anthology of dubious deals – crusty rolls 40p, two for £1!
  • (17) Sensitivity (dubious + positive, after exclusion of inadequates) was 0.83 and dependent on histologic type (infiltrating = 0.87, intraductal = 0.68).
  • (18) The vice-president even made repeated trips to CIA headquarters in Langley to bully analysts into producing more hawkish reports, while Rumsfeld’s Pentagon sucked up highly dubious “evidence” from Iraqi exiles and ideological freelancers.
  • (19) This becomes very dubious when they are more numerous.
  • (20) The change in surface tension did not correlate with a change in lung retractive forces or with lung lipid content and was, therefore, of dubious biological significance.