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Tuesday June 3, 2003

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specious \SPEE-shuhs\ , adjective:
1. Apparently right; superficially fair, just, or correct, but not so in reality; as, "specious reasoning; a specious argument."
2. Deceptively pleasing or attractive.

None of those alleged crises really is. They all rest on specious claims about financial abstractions, on scare stories about impending bankruptcy.
-- James K. Galbraith, Created Unequal

A specious theory is confuted by this free and perfect experiment.
-- Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

His descendant later took great pride in these specious titles, and Hawthorne humorously addressed him as "the Count."
-- Edward L. Widmer, Young America

Specious is from Latin speciosus, from species, "appearance," from specere, "to look at."

Dictionary.com Entry and Pronunciation for specious

 

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