What's the difference between dubious and shifty?

Dubious


Definition:

  • (a.) Doubtful or not settled in opinion; being in doubt; wavering or fluctuating; undetermined.
  • (a.) Occasioning doubt; not clear, or obvious; equivocal; questionable; doubtful; as, a dubious answer.
  • (a.) Of uncertain event or issue; as, in dubious battle.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) It’s impossible to automate fully the process of separating truth from falsehood, and it’s dubious to cede such control to for-profit media giants.
  • (2) The draw was enough to take England to the finals in Japan, where Beckham exorcised the demons of four years earlier by scoring the only goal (a dubiously awarded penalty) in the defeat of Argentina.
  • (3) But Blair's address - "history will forgive us" - was a dubious exercise in group therapy: the cheers smacked of pathetic gratitude, as he piously pardoned the legislators, as well as himself, for the catastrophe of Iraq.
  • (4) I drive past buildings that I know, or assume, to house bedsits, their stucco peeling like eczema, their window frames rattling like old bones, and I cannot help myself from picturing the scene within: a dubious pot on an equally dubious single ring, the female in charge of it half-heartedly stirring its contents at the same time as she files her nails, reads an old Vogue, or chats to some distant parent on the telephone.
  • (5) A dubious pattern is emerging of donations through front companies.
  • (6) The relationship of this metabolic aberration to the production of headache still remains dubious for various reasons.
  • (7) During his stints in the Bush and Obama administration Comey has continually taken authoritarian and factually dubious public stances both at odds with responsible public policy and sometimes the law.
  • (8) Today the overestimation of human understanding is reflected in a dogmatic adherence to specific professional or idealogically biased doctrines and in the dubious ideal of a purely empirical science with its limited applicability to mankind.
  • (9) It seems clear that even as we buy cheap clothes with dubious provenance, from an ethical standpoint, people want to do better.
  • (10) Their mechanism is dubious: swelling of mitochondria and intracellular lipidosis, which could signify cellular hypoxia, are rarely present.
  • (11) Imprecise definitions of these complications of necrotizing pancreatitis make inter-institutional comparisons of previously identified data dubious.
  • (12) Critics say this is part of a broader, dubious attempt to appease the Kremlin and boost bilateral trade.
  • (13) In his attempt to justify the unjustifiable, Mr Grieve has clutched at a fragile constitutional doctrine and adopted a deeply dubious legal course.
  • (14) Exporting what appear to be educational success stories is a dubious enterprise, because it is so easy to misread how another country's system works and to discount its cultural background.
  • (15) Observed retrospectively, in some cases death was the result of dubious indication.
  • (16) The Guardian’s own readers’ anthology of dubious deals – crusty rolls 40p, two for £1!
  • (17) Sensitivity (dubious + positive, after exclusion of inadequates) was 0.83 and dependent on histologic type (infiltrating = 0.87, intraductal = 0.68).
  • (18) The vice-president even made repeated trips to CIA headquarters in Langley to bully analysts into producing more hawkish reports, while Rumsfeld’s Pentagon sucked up highly dubious “evidence” from Iraqi exiles and ideological freelancers.
  • (19) This becomes very dubious when they are more numerous.
  • (20) The change in surface tension did not correlate with a change in lung retractive forces or with lung lipid content and was, therefore, of dubious biological significance.

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.

Words possibly related to "shifty"