What's the difference between facetious and specious?

Facetious


Definition:

  • (a.) Given to wit and good humor; merry; sportive; jocular; as, a facetious companion.
  • (a.) Characterized by wit and pleasantry; exciting laughter; as, a facetious story or reply.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) This, in turn, prompted an apology from the director, along with a (possibly facetious) denial that he was "a Nazi".
  • (2) He is very facetious and constantly observing the crowd… His character is very spontaneous, which I am but, at the same time, when I prepare a spectacle, I leave nothing to chance, I am very methodical.
  • (3) There are side-effects associated with inhaled steroids, which are the most commonly prescribed preventative treatment, but if standard doses are used these are usually mild.” For his part, Bush admitted his language may have been “facetious”.
  • (4) I obviously missed the point if they were horrified – it was funny and a little facetious."
  • (5) The tweet was "obviously facetious" and "a parody", he added.
  • (6) It was the first time that the men's and women's game had unified and instead we are talking about someone who we paid to come in as entertainment and be facetious about something we stand vehemently against so I apologise for that.
  • (7) "He looks permanently pink and facetious, as though life is one big public-school prank," writes the former Labour MP Chris Mullin, usually quite forgiving towards Tories, in his diaries for December 2010.
  • (8) Numerous articles have appeared in the English literature, but we have been able to find only two editorials in semi-facetious vein in the South African Medical Journal over the last 20 years.
  • (9) Heard’s barrister, Paula Morreau, said: “Obviously it’s foreshadowed and they wanted to attempt to … ” before White interjected to say she was “just being facetious”.
  • (10) Wodehouse was what Orwell called "a political innocent", someone whose essential stupidity about politics - "his mild facetiousness covering an unthinking acceptance [of the world he inhabited]" - rescued him from the charge of the worst sorts of hypocrisy.
  • (11) Sometimes …) If we follow the form, naturally there'll be the ritual feast, the haggis piped in, addressed, sacrificed and served, the traditional speeches, the Address to the Lassies, the Reply, the Immortal Memory, which is supposed to skip the facetiousness and meditate on some aspect of the poet's life and his work.
  • (12) Asked about the claim by the former Liberal MP Lord Alton that he had "facetiously" said Smith's behaviour was no different to conduct at public schools, Steel said: "You say it is a facetious remark.
  • (13) The facetiousness couldn't obscure the truism: five months after Chua's piece, Time magazine published an article titled " Why do we fear a rising China ?"
  • (14) (Parody and doggerel and facetiousness are big features of Burns suppers.
  • (15) "We have a very facetious Liverpool sense of humour, laughing at things which are stupid," says Wells.
  • (16) You can ask a facetious question too – just be sure to keep it respectful.
  • (17) When I say “know-nothing,” I’m not being facetious or hyperbolic.
  • (18) Twain understood publicity so well that he was merely amused when Huck Finn was banned by libraries across the US; when it was banned in Omaha, Nebraska, for example, he sent a telegram to the local newspaper, observing facetiously: "I am tearfully afraid this noise is doing much harm.
  • (19) A facetious comparison, maybe, but shouldn’t home crowds give Scottish comics an advantage?
  • (20) He said: “If the last few weeks tell us anything: it is rarely a help to mention Hitler in support of an argument by an ex-mayor of London.” Paddy Ashdown, the former Lib Dem leader, said Johnson was “yet another tuppenny tin-pot imitation Churchill promising to ‘fight them on the beaches’ while weakening our defences and wrecking our economy.” Owen Smith, a Labour shadow cabinet minister, said Johnson was “a cut-rate Donald Trump.” “It’s a ridiculous and facetious comment by a man who is apt to make ridiculous and facetious comments,” Smith told LBC.

Specious


Definition:

  • (a.) Presenting a pleasing appearance; pleasing in form or look; showy.
  • (a.) Apparently right; superficially fair, just, or correct, but not so in reality; appearing well at first view; plausible; as, specious reasoning; a specious argument.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Comment is perfectly legitimate, but the sneering, supercilious, specious and dismissive contributions masquerading as ‘commentary’ belittle the claims of a ‘quality’ paper.” Before attempting to assess the validity of the reader’s analysis – broadly shared by some other readers – I think his email reflects one or two other interesting aspects of the demographics of the Guardian’s readership and the left.
  • (2) Photograph: Da Capo Lifelong Books This is why I have no patience for anyone who insists that women must learn self-defense moves and memorize lists of specious advice to prevent our own victimization.
  • (3) To start with, despite my son's diagnosis, the local authority did what a lot of local authorities do, and refused to assess him, on the most specious of grounds.
  • (4) Please, get rid of the gimmicks – the faux-concerned and impersonal feedback loop and the specious “choice” paradigm designed to soften us up for privatisation – and listen to your frontline staff.
  • (5) And when you ask someone who’s passed along some specious “don’t get raped” tips or suggested a self-defense class to a woman concerned about rapes in her neighborhood what they were thinking, they’re likely to respond with something like “Better safe than sorry!” Translation: Even if what I’m telling you to remember is a pile of stinking horseshit, you should still engage in this ritualized expression of anxiety with me, because it makes me feel slightly better about things I can’t control.
  • (6) Roger Jones, editor of the British Journal of General Practice David Colquhoun's critique of my journal's peer review and editorial processes is based on a single table lifted from the main research paper, in which the detailed numerical data tell a somewhat different story, rendering his analysis partial and his conclusions specious.
  • (7) Dolezal’s specious claims to black ancestry and faux black identity could not have been sustained and she would not have been able to pass if black womanhood were seen and understood as more than skin – or weave – deep.
  • (8) On Monday, two Conservative chancellors, Nigel Lawson and Norman Lamont, accused Downing Street of publishing a Treasury document that amounted to propaganda , while one MP, Marcus Fysh, described it as “specious bollocks”.
  • (9) These two findings together predict that individuals known to have a marked PMR may have the diagnostic risk associated with these specious artifacts reduced by receiving diazepam before clinical ERG studies are begun.
  • (10) There is a creeping sense that this is turning into a cash cow for the private sector, a get-out-clause for the government ("we've spent all this money, if people can't get jobs despite our help, it's because they are inadequate"), and unemployed people will be left at the bottom, ceaselessly harassed by a totally specious narrative in which their laziness beggars a try-hard administration.
  • (11) Superficially it looks like the rightwing press falling into yet another fit of specious morality.
  • (12) Retrospectively applying the rubric of terrorism is specious.
  • (13) Boris Johnson trails his quest to return to the Commons – and obviously to become Tory leader – with the specious claim that the UK could have a “great and glorious future” outside the EU .
  • (14) P+ strains of serotypes 1b (two strains), 4b (seven strains), and untypeable (one strain) were isolated from nine Apodemus specious and one Apodemus argenteus.
  • (15) Asked about the attempt to destabilise his leadership, Clegg said: "I think it's odd, to put it very mildly, that any fellow Liberal Democrat should spend time and good money while the rest of us were out campaigning for these tough elections instead surreptitiously trying to come up with specious claims on the basis of polls, which were in any case entirely confounded by the election results.
  • (16) A number of arguments as to why aggregation produces spurious correlations are considered and shown to be specious.
  • (17) Further, as Prof Dimitro Godzinsky, of the Ukranian National Academy of Sciences, states in his introduction to the report: "Against this background of such persuasive data some defenders of atomic energy look specious as they deny the obvious negative effects of radiation upon populations.
  • (18) Four specious combinations of the mosquitos were distinguished as anthropophilic, sylvatic, meadow and marsh ones.
  • (19) It should reflect the seriousness of the crime committed and the magnitude of the harm suffered by the victim, and it is specious to argue that the child is not damaged most by the sexual abuse that took place in order for the image to be created.
  • (20) Ag-Gag laws have passed or are pending in nearly a dozen states , with Idaho's powerful dairy industry now the latest to use these specious legal arguments to hide unsavory practices.