What's the difference between cunning and shifty?

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?

Shifty


Definition:

  • (a.) Full of, or ready with, shifts; fertile in expedients or contrivance.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Lucas’s surname is Madikane ; ultra-conservative Brian was shifty around the couple.
  • (2) Across town via Royston Vasey, Steve Pemberton is Kevin Weatherill, a man colluding with some shifty types to kidnap his boss's daughter.
  • (3) There was Nick Griffin himself, described by my self-selected group of Twitter friends as: "incoherent", "shifty", an "arse" and more.
  • (4) Such process of "archaeology" seems to be the only suitable to supply us the cipher-key of the ambiguous, shifty character of oxygen, and entrust us with a cultural patrimony being unique as it is spendable in an immediate clinical future.
  • (5) The war's growing unpopularity meant there was less tolerance for shifty allies like Karzai perceived to have a foot in both camps.
  • (6) This suggests that the "shifty" tRNAs proposed by Jacks et al.
  • (7) This overlap region includes a "shifty" heptanucleotide, followed by a highly structured region that may contain a pseudoknot.
  • (8) In the case of one shifty sequence, frameshifting promoted by lysyl-tRNA limitation occurs at the sequence AAG C and is due to rightward movement of the ribosome so as to read the AGC triplet overlapping the hungry codon from the right.
  • (9) Another recent critics' favourite which might not have got a look-in elsewhere is Eran Creevy's Shifty, a fusion of kitchen-sink drama and urban crime thriller.
  • (10) One of the parallels between August 2007 and August 2011 is the shiftiness of those running the show, a sense that they are not letting on all they know for fear of creating more panic.
  • (11) 12.37pm: The Guardian's deputy editor, Ian Katz , has just tweeted: Cameron looking staggeringly shifty about extent to which he discussed Coulson appointment with Rebekah Brooks #Leveson — ian katz (@iankatz1000) June 14, 2012 12.39pm: Cameron says he asked Coulson about phone hacking in a face-to-face meeting in the Norman Shaw building in Westminster, at which he sought assurances from Coulson.
  • (12) The presence of a "shifty" heptanucleotide sequence in this region and a downstream RNA pseudoknot structure indicate that ORF1b is probably expressed by ribosomal frameshifting.
  • (13) Self-regarding, clever, shifty Boris must be counted among those many voters who have said since Friday: “I only voted leave because I assumed remain would win.” He deserves to be made to sweep up the glass after the Brexit party, but it’s not his style.
  • (14) He tries to look and sound sincere, and perhaps he is; but he comes across all the same as rather nervous and shifty.
  • (15) In almost all cases a stable hairpin was predicted four to nine nucleotides downstream of the shifty heptanucleotide.
  • (16) Dare I ask the bookseller (who has probably recognised the shifty look in my eyes) if not, why not?
  • (17) They still loved him as they never loved Tony Blair, who also got stuck with the shifty label.
  • (18) This is not a strong, confident government, it is a shifty, grubby regime, tin-eared to the views of our friends and brainwashed by the Ukip world view.
  • (19) He certainly came across as an uninspiring and slightly shifty bureaucrat, concerned more about his ambitions than anything else – but, then again, that’s pretty much the persona with which we’re familiar from his parliamentary career.
  • (20) The lavender, reclining on a chaise longue is looking shifty and smoking a cigarette.

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