What's the difference between misleading and specious?

Misleading


Definition:

  • (p. pr. & vb. n.) of Mislead
  • (a.) Leading astray; delusive.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Both condemn the treatment of Ibrahim, whose supposed offence appears to have shifted over time, from fabricating a defamatory story to entering a home without permission to misleading an interviewee for an article that was never published.
  • (2) "The proposed 'reform' is designed to legitimise this blatantly unfair, police state practice, while leaving the rest of the criminal procedure law as misleading decoration," said Professor Jerome Cohen, an expert on China at New York University's School of Law.
  • (3) The use of 100% oxygen to calculate intrapulmonary shunting in patients on PEEP is misleading in both physiological and methodological terms.
  • (4) David Cameron was accused of revealing his ill-suppressed Bullingdon Club instincts when he shouted at the Labour frontbencher Angela Eagle to "calm down, dear" as she berated him for misleading MPs at prime minister's questions.
  • (5) The derived data lacks specificity, however, and, as such, is frequently misleading.
  • (6) Families believed that physicians would not listen (13% of sample), would not talk openly (32%), attempted to mislead them (48%), or did not warn about long-term neurodevelopmental problems (70%).
  • (7) Serological findings in five cases where Paul-Bunnel Davidsohn (PBD) test results were misleading, are presented.
  • (8) Second, the commonly drawn analogy between blocking in randomized trials and matching in cohort studies is misleading when one considers the impact of matching on covariate distributions.
  • (9) In an article for the Nation, Chomsky courts controversy by arguing that parallels drawn between campaigns against Israel and apartheid-era South Africa are misleading and that a misguided strategy could damage rather than help Israel's victims.
  • (10) At the end of the article the Department for Work and Pensions is quoted as saying that it’s “misleading to link food bank use to benefit delays and sanctions”.
  • (11) The authors argue that these "principles" do not function as claimed, and that their use is misleading both practically and theoretically.
  • (12) They claim that Zero Dark Thirty is "grossly inaccurate and misleading in its suggestion that torture resulted in information that led to the capture".
  • (13) The European court of human rights has accused British newspapers, including the Daily Mail, of publishing "seriously misleading" reports.
  • (14) This report indicates that hepatic copper levels vary greatly in acute liver failure, and that estimates from a single biopsy specimen may be misleading as to the cause of the underlying liver disease.
  • (15) Maybe the claimants were politicians who took a strict stance on moral issues, or people who had misleadingly used their family image to seek office or commercial gain?
  • (16) However, in a demonstration of the intense secrecy surrounding NSA surveillance even after Edward Snowden's revelations, the senators claimed they could not publicly identify the allegedly misleading section or sections of a factsheet without compromising classified information.
  • (17) Again, the government is deliberately misleading the public by aggregating figures over an area which no one would describe as theirs.
  • (18) But the Tories edited out a crucial final sentence in which Balls told BBC Radio Leeds on 9 January : “But I think we can be tougher and we should be and we will.” Labour seized on the Tory editing of the Balls interview to accuse the Tories of misleading people to defend their refusal to tackle tax avoidance.
  • (19) We therefore conclude that the clinical management of bronchiolitis requires close monitoring of body wt and plasma osmolality-urinary osmolality relationship; serum sodium levels may be misleading.
  • (20) It is not only the misleading newspaper headlines about this U-turn which are causing confusion.

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.