What's the difference between special and specious?

Special


Definition:

  • (a.) Of or pertaining to a species; constituting a species or sort.
  • (a.) Particular; peculiar; different from others; extraordinary; uncommon.
  • (a.) Appropriate; designed for a particular purpose, occasion, or person; as, a special act of Parliament or of Congress; a special sermon.
  • (a.) Limited in range; confined to a definite field of action, investigation, or discussion; as, a special dictionary of commercial terms; a special branch of study.
  • (a.) Chief in excellence.
  • (n.) A particular.
  • (n.) One appointed for a special service or occasion.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) The bank tellers who saw their positions filled by male superiors took special pleasure in going to the bank and keeping them busy.
  • (2) The frequency of rare fragile sites was studied among 240 children in special schools for subnormal intelligence (IQ 52-85).
  • (3) Theoretical findings on sterilization and disinfection measures are useless for the dental practice if their efficiency is put into question due to insufficient consideration of the special conditions of dental treatment.
  • (4) The Cole-Moore effect, which was found here only under a specific set of conditions, thus may be a special case rather than the general property of the membrane.
  • (5) In order to control noise- and vibration-caused diseases it was necessary not only to improve machines' quality and service conditions but also to pay special attention to the choice of operators and to the quality of monitoring their adaptation process.
  • (6) Despite of the increasing diagnostic importance of the direct determination of the parathormone which is at first available only in special institutions in these cases methodical problems play a less important part than the still not infrequent appearing misunderstanding of the adequate basic disease.
  • (7) Historical analysis shows that institutions and special education services spring from common, although not identical, societal and philosophical forces.
  • (8) The clinical usefulness of neonatal narcotic abstinence scales is reviewed, with special reference to their application in treatment.
  • (9) The very young history of clinical Psychology is demonstrating the value of clinical Psychologist in the socialistic healthy work and the international important positions of special education to psychological specialist of medicine.
  • (10) The differences might be due to an arrest of "specialization" in the regional expression of the different MHC isoforms.
  • (11) Mary's grief, which lasts for about the first half of the two-hour premiere special, is the finest work of the series so far by Michelle Dockery.
  • (12) The authors describe the special medical expertise of the psychiatrist and define 11 indicators, such as a patient's need for new psychotropic medication or the presence of symptoms requiring medical or laboratory procedures, that can be used to determine whether psychiatric expertise is needed.
  • (13) Many examples are given to demonstrate the applications of these programs, and special emphasis has been laid on the problem of treating a point in tissue with different doses per fraction on alternate treatment days.
  • (14) Doctors may plausibly make special claims qua doctors when they are treating disease.
  • (15) Following mass disasters and individual deaths, dentists with special training and experience in forensic odontology are frequently called upon to assist in the identification of badly mutilated or decomposed bodies.
  • (16) The indication of the DNA probe method would be considered in the four cases as follows, 1. necessity of the special equipment to isolate the pathogen, 2. necessity of the long period to isolate the pathogen, 3. existence of the cross reaction among the pathogen and relative organisms in the immunological procedure, 4. existence of the difficulty to identify the species of the pathogen by the ordinary procedure.
  • (17) This procedure generated a number of VI-like effects, supporting the notion that VI behavior can be construed as a special case of an interaction between the organism's function relating reinforcement susceptibilities to chain length and the experimenter's function relating probabilities of reinforcement to chain length.
  • (18) Special conditions apply for the scoring of a first and a last bone stage in a sequence, which will introduce less bias in the estimation of individual skeletal maturity with the MAT-method than with the TW-method.
  • (19) I also decided that the Kushner-Harvard relationship deserved special attention.
  • (20) A television camera scans the spread through microscope optics; computer and special purpose electronics process the video signals to generate run length histograms.

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.