Reading 'Does the post above mine seem specious?' doesn't seem strange to me... made sense, nothing odd about syntax. Regards, -- poster known for a lot of long and obscure words in his novels here
Hmm. If I take 'specious' to be obs : presenting a pleasing appearance : pleasing in form or look : SHOWY superficially beautiful or attractive but not so in reality : deceptively beautiful apparently right or proper : superficially fair, just, or correct but not so in reality : appearing well at first view : PLAUSIBLE existing to our senses : actually known or experienced — see SPECIOUS PRESENT then I'd be looking at post #19 to see if it gave me some especially strong initial impression of beauty or propriety or persuasiveness that would then disappoint on further scrutiny. But I don't think I even noticed the first part, any first impression so especially favorable as to risk later disappointment. So maybe all I'm saying is that my answer to 'does the post seem specious?' is, I guess, no. But Kris also drew attention to specific details involving the timestamp, which made me wonder if I was missing something in the question. Those timestamp details do sound odd, but not odd in a way that ever made me first think extra-highly of the post and then be disappointed by it. I guess Kris maybe meant 'specious' in sense 3, taking 'apparently right or proper' as 'apparently a normal post by a human PriusChat member' but then on further scrutiny appearing to be something posted by a bot or spammer. Am I getting warmer?
The pared-down definition returned by Google is (as you'd naturally hope) pretty compatible with the careful Webster's 3rd definition quoted in post #25, most closely with sense 3. So, does that Googled definition somehow better fit post #19? Was Kris saying that what michaeljames posted about lug studs was "superficially plausible, but actually wrong"? I think maybe that's getting colder than my guess in #25: I didn't see Kris's focus really being on the content, or rightness/wrongness, of what michaeljames had to say about lug studs at all. The details that she singled out had more to do with the timestamp, and the way the last sentence sounded like an ad. So I think until I have a better guess, I'll stick with guessing that Kris found #19 superficially like a natural human post, while actually (not wrong but) likely bot-written or spam. Sort of like a twist on the idea of speciousness, applying it now to provenance rather than to content. A not-inconceivable twist, but one that evaded me at first. But I bet Kris knows better than either of us.
Not out to debate anyone. Philology sometimes involves people leaning their heads together over the history of some word and cooperatively knocking ideas around, where the payoff is being able to get more of the nuance of what someone wanted to convey by a particular choice. Kris is a long-time poster here whose posts I look forward to, and I don't mind putting in a little extra effort to get more of the nuance of what she is saying. But somehow we've all ended up in a climate where people rush to see everything as 'debate' (and not even good-natured debate, at that). I can't help seeing that as a loss.
