• captious •
Part of Speech: Adjective
Meaning: 1 Deceptive in a way that misleads, entraps; sophistical. 2. Having an ill-natured fondness for catching others at fault and raising objections; caviling, carping.
Notes: Captious is another in our series of words that are not what they seem. It has nothing to do with captains or captions but is a well-behaved adjective from a poor but tidy family. It has an adjective, captiously, and a noun, captiousness, and that is pretty much it.
In Play: "Have you stopped beating your husband?" is a captious question in the first sense of the word: it tries to entrap you. It brings to mind advertisements like, "Super Eldopé Extra with BMX-43 helps stop tough headache pain according to studies by a respected east coast research institution." This ad is designed to make you think Eldopé is a wonder drug for stopping headaches. But "BMX-43" could be evaporated water and the studies may have been conducted at the company's own laboratories in the woods outside New Monia, Maine. People who are captious in the second sense never have a good word for anyone or anything. If you know a captious person, treat them to and with a subscription to our Good Word service.
Word History: This good if misguiding word is another of the many that came to us from Latin via Old French. It began as Latin captisus, the adjective from captio "seizure, sophism," the noun of capere "to seize." Related words from Latin include capture and caption (a phrase that 'grabs' you). The English word catch comes from Old North French cachier "to chase" from the same Latin word. The original Proto-Indo-European root, *kap, came down to English as have and German haben. Heavy is another great-grandson that arrived via Old English hefig. In German it became Haft "arrest" but also the suffix -haft "having," as in lebhaft "lively, spirited" from Leb-en "life" + -haft.