The captious usually plays with a double meaning.
Captious is an adjective that comes from a word that in Latin refers to something false or fallacious that is expressed in words or is part of a proposition or doctrine .
The term also serves to refer to an argument or a question that serves to obtain a response from the interlocutor; that is, as a form of provocation so that the interlocutor utters a response that may compromise him or her or that favors the purposes of the person formulating the expression.
Some phrases in which the term is found are: “The interviewer tricked him with a trick question and the mayor confessed that he hired his son as an advisor,” “That is a trick argument that seeks to confuse the population,” “It is about of a deceitful movement, which seduces young people with promises of freedom but ends up subjecting them to a leader.”
The captious and the meaning
A loaded phrase usually implies a double meaning . One literal, which is presented as a single meaning , and another that must be discovered between the lines and that can lead a person to expose it or say something that, in reality, they were not willing to confess.
A trick question can also play directly into the literal . A man leaves his house and finds his neighbor changing a tire on his car. Then he asks: “Do you want me to give you a hand?” When his neighbor answers in the affirmative, he takes a plastic hand out of his pocket, hands it to him and leaves. This situation, with humorous overtones, presents a trick question because it has a double intention.
Another similar example occurs when someone orders a “glass of water” and, instead of receiving a glass with water inside, they receive a glass made with water (ice).
A misleading statement provokes surprise.
surprise search
The objective of trick phrases is to surprise the intelligence of the listeners and generate a particular response in them. In order to formulate them, it is necessary to take a characteristic of reality and express it in a confusing way, which allows a double interpretation .
The interlocutor has two options: take literally what these words imply (getting the wrong message) or try to understand the true meaning of the sentence (having to capture the irony hidden in the words).
Adjectival forms similar to capcioso
The adjective captious is usually used to refer to speeches and reasoning that encompass a certain falsehood . These types of speeches are characterized because through a subtle chain and a certain manipulation of language, they manage to lead the interlocutor to find himself in a situation that he could not suspect or foresee. They tend to rely on principles that at first glance are true but that lead to false consequences.
There are various adjectives that could be considered similar to deceitful, among them we can mention: malicious , devious, twisted or insidious . Although some differences can be established between them, due to the nuance that each adjective contains, in general they could be used as synonyms .
However, it is interesting to establish the difference between an insidious speech and a deceitful one, by choosing two that are very similar. This difference lies in the fact that the first is presented in a seductive way, while the second dazzles the interlocutor and does not give him time to realize the deception. In both cases, when the interlocutor wants to react it is too late and he is already part of a mess from which it will be very difficult for him to escape.
In any case, a misleading speech is used by someone who does not have clear intentions or who knows that the only way to obtain the result (the interlocutor's response) they want is through deception and the pronunciation of a diffuse message .