Make Your Point > Archived Issues > CAPTIOUS

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explore the archives: "Captious" means "always pointing out flaws." Captious people often qu_____, or complain about little details that don't even matter. make your point with... "CAPTIOUS" Someone or something captious focuses too much on every little thing that's wrong with something. In other words, captious people are overly eager to call attention to faults and flaws. Pronunciation: CAP shuss Part of speech: Adjective. (Adjectives are describing words, like "large" or "late." They can be used in two ways: 1. Right before a noun, as in "a captious thing" or "a captious person." 2. After a linking verb, as in "It was captious" or "He was captious.") Other forms: captiously, captiousness How to use it: Talk about captious people and captious personalities, a captious temper or a captious mood, captious comments (either spoken or written: captious remarks, captious reviews, captious analyses), captious questions and demands, and captious criticism. You can be captious about something: "I'm captious about how the dishes get done, so I usually do them myself." Like with many other adjectives, you can refer to people who are captious by calling them "the captious" or "the most captious:" "This meal would please even the most captious." examples: She hasn't been invited back. I can't tolerate her captious comments. Working at a photo lab in college, I learned to deal with captious customers--like the woman who insisted that her photos didn't look "real" even though she couldn't say why. Are they blurry? No. Are the colors off? No. Can I reprint them for you on a different type of paper? No... study it now: Look away from the screen to explain the definition in your own words. You’ll know you understand what "captious" means when you can explain it without saying "fault-finding" or "hypercritical." try it out: Think of something you do your own way, even though other people tell you to do it differently. Fill in the blank: "I (do something in a certain way) without regard to objections from the captious." Example: "I split infinitives, end sentences with prepositions, and start sentences with conjunctions without regard to objections from the captious." before you review: Spend at least 20 seconds occupying your mind with the game below. Then try the review questions. Don’t go straight to the review now—let your working memory empty out first. Each day in July, we played with a specific stylistic technique or quality. You recreated (as closely as you could) the quotes that I botched by removing those qualities.  From yesterday: Whether a phrase exhibits parallelism, or epistrophe, or isocolon, or any other technique we've looked at this month is rarely open to interpretation--it either does or doesn't, as long as we're clear on definitions. But consider the atticism. It's any refined, elegant, well-turned phrase...which is a pretty subjective definition. Here's Samuel Johnson: "What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure." Can we agree to call that one an atticism? How about this one, from the book of Romans? "Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind." Ralph Waldo Emerson didn't say, "Being angry is a waste of time and makes you sad." Arguably, his real words constitute an atticism. What are they? Answer: "For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness." Now, a new game for August! This month, we’ll play with anagrams: rearrangements of the letters in a word to form new words. (For example, “care” has two anagrams: “acre” and “race.”) Looking for these makes you a stronger player in other word games. But more importantly, it helps you practice thinking flexibly and methodically. Plus you get to giggle at potential non-words and discover new real words. We’ll work our way from shorter to longer anagrams. And at any point if you wonder why I left out a word you wanted to list, or why I included a word you think isn’t a real one, hold your fire: our authority for this game is ScrabbleWordFinder.org, which draws from a highly inclusive dictionary. Let’s play! Try this one today: What are the 4 anagrams for TRAP? review today's word: 1. The opposite of CAPTIOUS is A. LEVEL B. LENIENT C. LEFT-LEANING 2. It's much easier to be captious, to _____ rather than solve them. A. create puzzles B. identify problems C. write equations Answers are below. a final word: To be a sponsor and send your own message to readers of this list, please contact Liesl at Liesl@HiloTutor.com. Disclaimer: Word meanings presented here are expressed in plain language and are limited to common, useful applications only. Readers interested in authoritative and multiple definitions of words are encouraged to check a dictionary. Likewise, word meanings, usage, and pronunciations are limited to American English; these elements may vary across world Englishes. Answers to review questions: 1. B 2. B