What's the difference between cunning and literal?

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?

Literal


Definition:

  • (a.) According to the letter or verbal expression; real; not figurative or metaphorical; as, the literal meaning of a phrase.
  • (a.) Following the letter or exact words; not free.
  • (a.) Consisting of, or expressed by, letters.
  • (a.) Giving a strict or literal construction; unimaginative; matter-of fast; -- applied to persons.
  • (n.) Literal meaning.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) They are just literally lying.” In August Microsoft severed its ties, saying Alec’s stance on climate change and several other issues “conflicted directly with Microsoft’s values”.
  • (2) Estimated fluid consumption dropped from 10 liters to 4 liters daily and incidents of hyponatremia decreased by 62%.
  • (3) Resting plasma epinephrine and norepinephrine levels were 13.1 and 2.1 nmol liter-1 for the marine toad (Bufo marinus).
  • (4) And we literally had hundreds of thousands of them."
  • (5) Standard additions are unnecessary; Pt concentrations are read from a calibration chart of peak heights, which is linear up to 1.6 mg per liter.
  • (6) Communication issues in obtaining organ donation consent were examined, with particular focus on what are literally life-and-death decisions.
  • (7) It could still be terrorism but it looks as if the aircraft went out of control because the controls were literally burning up.
  • (8) A novel vector was employed which permits rapid and highly efficient cleavage of the GST fusion protein yielding 10 mg of purified PurH product per liter of bacterial culture.
  • (9) You literally never see that at political rallies, though obviously at Tea Party ones they are there all the time."
  • (10) An empirical rate expression was developed from experimental data which led to a prediction that the natural rate of oxidation in the ocean is about 0.023 micromoles of As(III) per liter each year.
  • (11) A technology for preparation of purified concentrates of rabies virus has been developed permitting to use simultaneously dozens of liters of tissue culture virus-containing fluid for the preparation of a concentrate.
  • (12) The maximum effect was obtained with 10(-7) molar gibberellic acid, whereas concentrations greater than 5 x 10(-7) mole per liter were inhibitory.
  • (13) Years ahead of its time, it saw each song presented theatrically, the musicians concealed in the wings (although Bowie said that they kept creeping on to the stage, literally unable to resist the spotlight) and with Bowie performing on a cherry-picker and on a giant hand, both of which kept breaking down.
  • (14) Some women attended the protest wearing jeans and T-shirts, while others took the mission of reclaiming the word "slut" – one of the stated objectives of the movement – more literally and turned out in overtly provocative fishnets and stilettos.
  • (15) But nobody got the reference and "the next day it was literally on CNN".
  • (16) 1.57pm BST Lap 36: Punchy stuff from Jules Bianchi up to 13th, literally bumping his way through Kobayashi on the inside.
  • (17) The majority of children came from low socio-economic homes (61%) with mostly illiterate or semi-literate mothers.
  • (18) As compared with the normoglycemic patients, the patients with hypoglycemia had elevated median plasma concentrations of glucagon (44 vs. 11 pmol per liter; P = 0.001), epinephrine (3400 vs. 1500 pmol per liter; P = 0.012), norepinephrine (7500 vs. 2900 pmol per liter; P = 0.002), and lactate (3.5 vs. 2.1 mmol per liter; P = 0.020) and similar alanine and beta-hydroxybutyrate concentrations.
  • (19) Finally, poliovirus experimentally seeded in 20 liters of tape water was recovered from Johns-Manville D79-Johns-Manville D39 or Johns-Manville D79-Filterite 0.45 micron 142-mm filter combinations was a efficiencies of 86 and 85%, respectively.
  • (20) Results concerning existence and uniqueness of equilibria, stability of the equilibria, and boundedness of solutions suggest that "compensatory" systems might not be compensatory in the literal sense.