What's the difference between cunning and overreach?

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?

Overreach


Definition:

  • (v. t.) To reach above or beyond in any direction.
  • (v. t.) To deceive, or get the better of, by artifice or cunning; to outwit; to cheat.
  • (v. i.) To reach too far
  • (v. i.) To strike the toe of the hind foot against the heel or shoe of the forefoot; -- said of horses.
  • (v. i.) To sail on one tack farther than is necessary.
  • (v. i.) To cheat by cunning or deception.
  • (n.) The act of striking the heel of the fore foot with the toe of the hind foot; -- said of horses.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Governor Phil Bryant only offered a grudging acceptance of the order, saying the court had overreached into states’ rights and was “certainly out of step with the majority of Mississippians”.
  • (2) I appreciate things like that.” News about things like overreach in government surveillance make her uneasy but she said her tendency would be to shrug and say: “As long as I have no plans to threaten the national security, I don’t really have any reason to worry.” “In term of health privacy though, once we start thinking about health and our families, I think it’s very easy to realize that this is the most sensitive personal information about us,” she said.
  • (3) To self-described “militia members” sleeping in wind-whipped tents, drinking camp coffee and patrolling rocky hillsides with military-style weapons, protecting Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and his family from an overreaching federal government is a patriotic duty .
  • (4) They know how we tick in America and Europe – and they know what pushes us toward intervention and overreach.
  • (5) We would have made things much worse by going in there.” Blair, who was steeped in interventionist ideals about fighting global “evil”, certainly overreached his authority.
  • (6) The attorney general, George Brandis , said Heydon was a man of “stainless integrity” and casting doubt on his impartiality was a “terrible overreach by the Labor party”.
  • (7) Tony Abbott’s got himself into a real situation here where he overreached and said that he would shirtfront the Russian president and clearly he’s not going to shirtfront him.
  • (8) The government had been trying to slash the RET after a review last year found the legislated 41,000GWh could overreach the policy goal of 20% of all energy coming from renewables by 2020.
  • (9) We need food consumers to band with us on government overreach and extreme environmentalism,” Erin Maupin, a Harney County rancher in attendance, told the Guardian.
  • (10) The government's intense secrecy is an overreach, conducted at the expense of international law, human rights and popular notions of fairness.
  • (11) "Leakers and whistleblowers, together with the investigative journalists they inform, are a critically important pressure valve, however imperfect, that protect us from an overreaching national security establishment that uses the justifiable needs of operational secrecy to avoid scrutiny for its errors of judgment, incompetence, or malfeasance.
  • (12) I talked Charles up in the briefings but some of the journalists thought Charles was overreaching himself.
  • (13) The White House has responded with fury, calling it another case of “egregious overreach by a single unelected judge”.
  • (14) We are pleased that the court ruled against the Obama administration’s latest illegal federal overreach,” said Texas attorney general Ken Paxton , who led the challenge by Alabama, Wisconsin, West Virginia, Tennessee, Arizona, Maine, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Utah, Georgia, Mississippi and Kentucky.
  • (15) The groups called on the intelligence and security committee to consider whether some form of warrant process should be required for access to metadata to guard against agency overreach.
  • (16) Why are the Coalition and Labor both embracing this overreaching law?
  • (17) And now that the trial is over, I am none the wiser – save to say that I think the prosecution overreached itself in pushing for premeditated murder and that I agree with the judge that the evidence did not support the charge.
  • (18) We can not have a two tiered internet that supports the privileged and leaves the rest of us lagging behind.” But Republican commissioners Ajit Pai and Michael O’Reilly the FCC was overreaching and its attempts at regulation were likely to be harmful and would fail.
  • (19) In his speech, titled “securing freedom in the age of terrorism”, Brandis argued the domestic security risk posed by terrorists must not be underestimated, but the government had “been careful” to ensure it did not overreach in its response to the threat.
  • (20) Legal experts have warned the government has overreached in applying the revocation powers to these kind of offences.