captious

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The Word of the Day for August 15 is:

captious   \KAP-shuss\   adjective 
     1 : marked by an often ill-natured inclination to stress faults and raise 
objections 
    *2 : calculated to confuse, entrap, or entangle in argument

Example sentence:
     The teacher often deliberately asked captious questions to get the 
students debating.

Did you know?
     If you suspect that "captious" is a relative of "capture" and "captivate," 
you're right. All of those words are related to the Latin verb "capere," which 
means "to take." "Captious" actually comes from "captio," a Latin offspring of 
"capere," which literally means "a taking" but which was also used to mean "a 
deception" or "a sophistic argument." Arguments labeled "captious" are likely 
to capture you in a figurative sense; they often entrap through subtly 
deceptive reasoning or trifling points. A captious individual is one who you 
might also dub "hypercritical," the sort of carping, censorious critic only too 
ready to point out minor faults or raise objections on trivial grounds.

*Indicates the sense illustrated in the example sentence.