"Don't tell us specious rumours," was the gist of the Ghanaian response.
Onlookers would misunderstand the facts — shunning us as vulnerable foreigners, showering us with specious pity, or sensationalizing the crime in the manner of the media.
Cloaking his greed in paeans to God's glory, he is a master of what Dr. Johnson called "the secret ambush of a specious prayer": "Keep carrying us forward, Lord, always forward, deeper and deeper into your grace," Steven prays, when it looks like the deal has been clinched.
Finally, the specious comparison may make us recall the children still trapped in Sarajevo, and suddenly the popularity of Miss Filipovic's book seems as appalling as the idea of Anne Frank's diary becoming an international best seller while its author -- or a classmate -- was still hiding in that attic.
In Becker's lifetime it had become incumbent upon members of the professoriate, successors to the bards and minstrels of yesteryear, "to enlarge and enrich the specious present common to us all to the end that 'society' (the tribe, the nation, or all mankind) may judge of what it is doing in the light of what it has done and what it hopes to do".
"It is a specious argument and it places us in an unpredictable situation when it comes to our plans to keep the port competitive with other deep-water ports along the east coast".
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.
To bring this out, let us suppose a single specious present has an apparent duration of around one second, e.g., enough to encompass two brief tones 'do-re'.
He has accused Iraq's vice president, Tariq al-Hashimi, of terrorism; moved to fire Deputy Prime Minister Saleh al-Mutlaq; and sought to investigate one of us, Rafe al-Essawi, for specious links to insurgents — all immediately after Mr. Maliki returned to Iraq from Washington, wrongly giving Iraqis the impression that he'd been given carte blanche by the United States to do so.
But that project is aimed at predicting the spread of diseases like smallpox so officials can help draft vaccination plans rather than mapping specious links between celebrities and the rest of us.
