What's the difference between cunning and tricksy?
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?
Tricksy
Definition:
(a.) Exhibiting artfulness; trickish.
Example Sentences:
(1) These principles may look tricksy or artificial when described rather than experienced but are not, says Catton, an "exoskeleton" – rather they are entirely bound up with the ideas of the book.
(2) But what I do share with the hundreds of thousands living with this tricksy condition is disbelief at the stigma and shame still surrounding a disease that affects the brain and which can ultimately affect as many as one in three of us.
(3) Last year, the video to Lily Allen's tricksy comeback single, Hard Out Here, showed her under the scrutiny of a plastic surgeon, protesting: "I've had two babies!"
(4) Tim Vine gag named funniest joke at Edinburgh Brian Logan on comedy snobs Stewart Lee review – tricksy gags about liberals, rightwingers and ‘the Islams’ Noel Fielding review – solo standup set is a holiday from reality Aziz Ansari: ‘It’s time to get serious’ Lee Mack review – latterday Eric Morecambe is gloriously daft Q&A: Dave Gorman gets to the point – ‘most of the world is lovely’
(5) Shappi Khorsandi review – perky gags about porn and prejudice Harry Hill on tour: ukuleles, inflatable sausages and Bradley Wiggins’ sideburns – video Kevin Bridges: ‘I prefer real to surreal’ Stewart Lee review – tricksy gags about liberals, rightwingers and ‘the Islams’ Noel Fielding review – solo standup set is a holiday from reality Aziz Ansari: ‘It’s time to get serious’
(6) The meticulous crafting of huge piles of rubbish into tricksy self-portraits - revealed only when light is projected upon the apparently formless heap and shadows are thrown against the wall - in both Dirty White Trash (With Gulls) and The Undesirables - are satisfyingly clever and punning, for example.
(7) Their Islamic State hostage sketch is a little glib, but there’s a funny skit about a couple planning (in different ways) to spice up their life together, and a tricksy number, reminiscent of The Pin , where Paul G Raymond and Luke Manning review and perform their show simultaneously.
(8) She has not been above being tricksy at the European table before, where that serves her partisan interests, including over the appointment of Jean-Claude Juncker as president of the commission, where her reported views blew about with the political wind.
(9) Arsène Wenger is also still seeking a non-tricksy midfielder and a serious centre-forward, sparking rumours as with the imminent arrival of Godot.
(10) More or less everyone says his best position is ahead of the midfield, obviously not as the traditional tricksy No10 but as a hairy chaos machine, someone who can hold the ball up half the time with the help of that famously massive chest of his, and the other half just causing a bit of havoc.
(11) No more the tricksy party of protest but, today and in future, and now mature, the nation's essential safeguard inside government.
(12) Harman says her contacts with Eustice were never "tricksy".
(13) The idea is that it will also learn to understand tricksy human traits such as irony, jokes and puns.
(14) One thing Ollie Dabbous didn't want to do was let the hype affect his food, which is clever without being tricksy, and often quite restrained.
(15) More comedy coverage Revealed: the nation’s No 1 toilet joke Shappi Khorsandi review – perky gags about porn and prejudice Stewart Lee review – tricksy gags about liberals, rightwingers and ‘the Islams’ Noel Fielding review – solo standup set is a holiday from reality Aziz Ansari: ‘It’s time to get serious’ Lee Mack review – latterday Eric Morecambe is gloriously daft Q&A: Dave Gorman gets to the point – ‘most of the world is lovely’ Ivo Graham review – old Etonian comic revels in inadequacy Rewind and recoil: Joseph Morpurgo’s twisted VHS world of comedy Bill Cosby standup review – at 77, still strikingly casual and effortlessly skilled
(16) On one hand, it might have been deliberate; a classic tricksy mind game designed to unsettle a side that had briefly threatened to halt Germany’s progress for good.