What's the difference between circumspect and furtive?

Circumspect


Definition:

  • (a.) Attentive to all the circumstances of a case or the probable consequences of an action; cautious; prudent; wary.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) General anaesthesia with apneic oxygenation may offer the ENT surgeon increased possibilities of exploration and operation at the level of the larynx and trachea, but owing to its biological consequences, it should be used only with circumspection and its indications should be totally justified, for acts of limited duration.
  • (2) Although internal fixation in one stage as an emergency, is ideal in all fractures, one should in fact be circumspect for the danger of infection should lead one to avoid carrying out internal fixation if this is not absolutely necessary.
  • (3) But other veterans of the liberation struggle were less circumspect.
  • (4) Splenectomy therefore should be regarded with circumspection in the management of patients with spur cell hemolytic anemia.
  • (5) Those who argue that extra government spending today could prove as beneficial as in the 1930s still want safeguards and a little circumspection.
  • (6) His recent speeches show he is now more circumspect.
  • (7) Ferguson strove to unsettle City beforehand with a calculated outburst over the allegedly vainglorious streak in the people who run City but earlier still in the week he had suggested circumspectly that these opponents are bound to win a trophy in due course.
  • (8) Perhaps such mistakes are unsurprising: much of the letter was cut and pasted verbatim, without acknowledgement or circumspection, from a document published by an anti-windfarm group called Country Guardian.
  • (9) Why it should concern them is probably the subject of some disagreement … they’ve been quite circumspect.
  • (10) The Arab spring has had its impact in Gaza, although confrontation with the territory's rulers is more circumspect in part because, unlike the now-defunct regimes across the Arab world, Hamas won an open election.
  • (11) One of his more cautious colleagues, the engineer who helped the Atomic Energy Authority test what happened when a train travelling at 100 miles a hour crashed into a flask of nuclear waste, is a little more circumspect.
  • (12) Unless bombing is used circumspectly as a tool to bring Houthis to the negotiating table, it is unlikely to have any positive impact on the situation in Yemen.
  • (13) While Sagrans is circumspect in discussing Obama’s record – “I don’t think it’s so much what he has done, more what Warren is really going to fight for” – a post on Wimsatt’s blog in 2010 was more critical.
  • (14) As the crowd took a much-needed breather and the game entered its last 10 minutes, Santos finally made his first concession to circumspection, replacing Nani with an extra defensive anchor in Porto’s Danilo Pereira, knowing that a point would see his side through come what may.
  • (15) His circumspection might derive in part from his background; like Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly, two artists with whom Johns has much in common, he grew up in the south at a time when those with artistic aspirations were advised to suppress them.
  • (16) It’s true, the OBR has been very circumspect in its forecast.
  • (17) Advances in chemical, numerical, and molecular systematic methods have contributed greatly to the circumspection of the rhodococci, including the development of diagnostic fluoregenic probes for improved biochemical profiling and identification.
  • (18) The City would be more circumspect about openly bankrolling the Conservatives if it thought there was a possibility that Labour might win the next election.
  • (19) Of course we should be circumspect about fiscal intentions and suspicious about spending plans.
  • (20) Those charities who are too circumspect, those who have too many overly-cautious trustees who don't want to rock the boat and those who become too cosy with governments of any stripe, diminish their own purpose and threaten their existence.

Furtive


Definition:

  • (a.) Stolen; obtained or characterized by stealth; sly; secret; stealthy; as, a furtive look.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) The judge said Tamir was given “little if any time” to respond to any commands from the officers, that his arms were not raised, and that he made no “furtive movement”.
  • (2) Turnbull later shrugged off the concern as there was nothing furtive about the deal, and noted it was reported by Australian media.
  • (3) Back then the town’s Kurdish character was furtive and suppressed.
  • (4) For the 30 years I have followed Spurs to away games – in pubs, around tube stations, on the streets around the ground and within Stamford Bridge itself, the venom, ignorance and breathtaking casualness of Chelsea fans’ references to Jews, Auschwitz, the Holocaust and foreskins, often accompanied by a hissing simulation of gas chambers, is simply shocking – not least because it goes unchallenged by police, stewards or the club itself, bar a token reference furtively hidden away in the match-day programme.
  • (5) The page name could have been better translated to "freedoms on the quiet", since the word "yavashaki" [furtive in Persian] also incorporates the word "yavash" meaning gently.
  • (6) Part-timers, meanwhile, are envied for having one foot in the playground and one in the office, but worry secretly about failing to keep up with either of them: skidding late into the school pick-up, still furtively sending emails on our phones.
  • (7) Abroad, he had perhaps been best known for his furtive motorcycle tryst with his actor lover, Julie Gayet, and his messy, public breakup with his First Lady, Valérie Trierweiler.
  • (8) Nearby, guards waited furtively at the entrance to the Islamic mourning tent for Sheikh Alman al-Shijah, blown apart last Friday by a bomb placed under his car.
  • (9) A small crowd grows larger, and furtive comments become denunciations as anger pours forth against Nkunda's National Congress for People's Defence.
  • (10) As I was talking his hand started creeping over my leg in a really furtive way.
  • (11) I had always loved writing the book: from the first furtive soundings of disaffected employees of Big Pharma in London, to forages among the industry’s white chimneys of Basel, and finally to the tribal villages of Kenya, where young mothers who could barely read were being bamboozled into signing “consent forms” that made guinea pigs of their own children.
  • (12) He said French troops had come up against "furtive firing" and had briefly fired back, but he said these exchanges had now stopped.
  • (13) The total number present on the island has been extremely difficult to determine due to the rugged terrain and the furtiveness of the monkeys.
  • (14) In his documentation of this furtive Islam , Degiorgis has also highlighted the ways in which a community under siege becomes resilient and collectively defiant in the face of creeping oppression.
  • (15) A politically feeble Japan, that once imperial Asian power, shelters furtively behind its US-made anti-missile batteries.
  • (16) By 1971, about 100 deserters were living furtively in a district of Saigon nicknamed "Soul Alley", beside Tan Son Nhut airport.
  • (17) All the druidic mumbo-jumbo about the Elevating Principle and the Straight Line reminds me of stuff I furtively read in my father's books on freemasonry.
  • (18) And given that the net effectively lowered what one might call the "shame threshold" (instead of having to sneak furtively into a "specialist" shop, punters could view from the comfort and privacy of their own homes), the internet undoubtedly expanded the market for commercial porn.
  • (19) Though he often shrank snail-like into stay-at-home furtiveness, the town that made him - Salem, Massachusetts - (as any visitor can still see) faces the dark, windy ocean, and it was this Hawthorne would stare at when he worked in its Custom House from 1846-49.
  • (20) When they do, it is in a slightly furtive way, almost in whispers.