What's the difference between artifice and cunning?

Artifice


Definition:

  • (n.) A handicraft; a trade; art of making.
  • (n.) Workmanship; a skillfully contrived work.
  • (n.) Artful or skillful contrivance.
  • (n.) Crafty device; an artful, ingenious, or elaborate trick. [Now the usual meaning.]

Example Sentences:

  • (1) The authors describe a technical artifice, the use silicon-impregnated compresses, to help in the peroperative ultrasonographic detection of these section planes.
  • (2) The seriousness and sincerity were almost shocking in that den of artifice.
  • (3) More recently, Iain Sinclair, in his novel Dining on Stones, an elegy to the A13, describes it as: "A landscape to die for: haze lifting to a high clear morning, pylons, distant road, an escarpment of multi-coloured containers, a magical blend of nature and artifice."
  • (4) As I signed up, I decided to ask Martha a few questions to see how much of her was artifice.
  • (5) All of the suffering in Europe – inflicted in the service of a man-made artifice, the euro – is even more tragic for being unnecessary.
  • (6) There never will be sufficient financial resources, organizational artifice, or measurable standards to safeguard quality any other way.
  • (7) Poisonous and deleterious components are deemed to be "added," even if they are natural constituents of food, if any amount is present through the artifice of man.
  • (8) As such, the migration amendment bill seeks to implement a staggering legal artifice for a nation that claims to walk tall among the civilised.
  • (9) Technical artifices are described to assist compliance with these imperatives.
  • (10) "These are legal artifices created to result in paying less tax," he said.
  • (11) But this operation imposes technical artifices when direct urtero-vesical implantation is not possible.
  • (12) Close friends say this is not artifice, but reflects his personality; in any case positioning himself as the polar opposite of the frequently choleric Sarkozy has paid off in the polls.
  • (13) The less visible in the context of individual's facial architecture the more esthetic the prosthetic artifice is.
  • (14) It's almost as though the more outmoded a politician becomes, the more artifice is required to keep him fresh.
  • (15) We think that this artifice could also be used in case of anatomic variations of the hepatic artery like trifurcation.
  • (16) The essence of camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.
  • (17) Barnard's unusual technique, highlighting the artifice in film-making, showed that no single person has a monopoly on truth – and certainly not the documentary director who shapes truth into a narrative in the editing process.
  • (18) The proper manoeuvres and artifices to avoid intraoperative accidents are suggested.
  • (19) Remarkable for its relentless skewering of artifice and pretension, Lucky Jim also contains some of the finest comic set pieces in the language.
  • (20) As Susan Sontag wrote, camp is artifice and theatricality and flamboyance.

Cunning


Definition:

  • (a.) Knowing; skillful; dexterous.
  • (a.) Wrought with, or exhibiting, skill or ingenuity; ingenious; curious; as, cunning work.
  • (a.) Crafty; sly; artful; designing; deceitful.
  • (a.) Pretty or pleasing; as, a cunning little boy.
  • (a.) Knowledge; art; skill; dexterity.
  • (a.) The faculty or act of using stratagem to accomplish a purpose; fraudulent skill or dexterity; deceit; craft.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) But the Franco-British spat sparked by Dave's rejection of Angela and Nicolas's cunning plan to save the euro has been given wings by news the US credit agencies may soon strip France of its triple-A rating and is coming along very nicely, thank you. "
  • (2) According to his blog, he's been acting on the advice of a friend and pursuing a course of "silence, exile and cunning", but I'm not sure a couple of years of not giving interviews to Heat qualifies.
  • (3) "They are alert, cunning and devious individuals who have current knowledge of investigative methods and techniques which may be used against them," said an internal report.
  • (4) 3.16pm BST Myners explains that his solution is a PLC-plus board -- a highly qualified board, holding the executive to account, complemented by a national council who is charged with checking that the board is doing what it should ( acting like shareholders, effectively ) He denies that it's a cunning plan to get his friends onto the Co-op board.
  • (5) The SNP minority government at Holyrood after 2007 survived from day to day by cunning deals that played the other parties off against one another.
  • (6) In fact, not only have the teams that failed to qualify not been invited to play, for if they were that would contradict the elitist terms of the qualification that are disavowed so cunningly here by Pitbull, but also in reality, only Fifa functionaries, Brazilian bureaucrats and half the BBC will get into Brazil's stadiums gratis this summer.
  • (7) The capacity of urea-N synthesis (CUNS), the galactose elimination capacity (GEC) and the antipyrine clearance (APC) were measured in rats immediately after 30, 70 and 90% partial hepatectomy and after sham operation.
  • (8) 1980 was his best year for opera: the Cologne company (whose music director, John Pritchard, became a staunch supporter) brought Mozart's Cosi Fan Tutte and Cimarosa's Il Matrimonio Segreto, Glasgow provided Berg's Wozzeck and Janacek's The Cunning Little Vixen, and the festival itself produced a distinguished world premiere in Maxwell Davies' The Lighthouse.
  • (9) In it she explains how she scratched the graffito "My French teacher is a cun-" on a door, and was stopped just as she finished that crucial "t".)
  • (10) Putin is a cunning negotiator with the skills of a KGB colonel, varying between brute force, charm and obfuscation.
  • (11) He added that the core message from Pyongyang was that South Korea’s National Intelligence Service was using the reptiles “as part of a ‘cunning scheme’ to challenge our unity”.
  • (12) It needed stamina, ice-in-the-veins bravery, cunning, cool judgment and brute determination.
  • (13) So much so that he ends the press conference with the point, and has a little smile at his own cunning.
  • (14) Running at the visiting defence, N’Doye produced a cunning disguise pass that the Croat Jelavic took in his stride and dispatched past Brad Guzan via a looping deflection.
  • (15) Only Eurovision could offer up such a song: a plea for ethnic tolerance, cunningly disguised as an Abba track with the offcuts from a pantomime.
  • (16) Anyway, back to these fraudsters, who are the least costly element of a leaky system, but nevertheless transfix the political imagination as though they were masterminds of cunning and audacity, whose long game were to destroy the fabric of society altogether.
  • (17) Steve Hilton's cunning plan to abolish all consumer, employment and maternity rights got a dusty answer, while his green passions are at least tolerated.
  • (18) Former schemes were tiny but this one is mammoth, the debt kept cunningly off the public borrowing books (which the Office for National Statistics allowed; it's said the Treasury was amazed).
  • (19) It turned out that the Square Mile is cunningly designed so as to have almost nowhere for such groups to gather, so the protesters ended up by the skirts of St Paul's.
  • (20) Undercover underwear What do you do when you develop a cunning remote-monitoring system to track soldiers’ performance in the field, but they don’t want to wear a clumsy chest strap, or forget to wear the wristband?