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.
Languages are living things. Words and phrases have their use shift over time; 'pure vanilla' and 'government issue' were once positive descriptors. The definition you are referencing you were published in 1961. Webster's added new words in later editions, but weren't doing much revising to existing material. This is the first def listed for specious on the Merriam-Webster site; having a false look of truth or genuineness SPECIOUS Definition & Meaning - Merriam-Webster
Porsche uses the lug bolts too and provides a threaded peg you put into the top hole so you lift the wheel and hang it on the peg until you have installed lug bolts into the remaining holes. Considering these were cars which were going to go 100 MPH plus in their long life, must have been a reason. I always found it simple but then I was 20 years younger then.
I can see lining up one post easier than lining up five. In the past, the bolts meant less wheel wiggle forming as they were one connection point vs two to develop give. I think manufacturing tolerances have reached the point where there is no difference between the systems in that regard. For German brands, it's bolts these days cause that is how they always done them. Then the supercars are moving to the single nut system used in racing. Well, I doubt Toyota decided to go with bolts for the bZ4X for performance reasons. More likely they saw the cost savings the BMW Supra had from using them.
They do, but I'm not sure that's the key here (and when they do, their history often continues to color the newer usages). Works for me. That's not an unfamiliar or new use; it's essentially the third sense given in Webster's 3rd (just like the similarly-abridged entry seen in #26). You could already use the word that way in the 17th century. The main difference between the longer W3 entry and the shorter online results is the background the online results leave out. None of that much changes the thing I first wondered about here: I don't think Kris was saying there was a false look of truth or genuineness to any of what michaeljames said about lug studs. My main reason for thinking that: the details she singled out weren't really about the content, but about the timestamp (and, ok, about one sentence seeming like an ad). So I kind of think (but I'm not Kris, so that's why I asked her) that she might have been getting at whether the post, just as a forum post, had a "false look of ... genuineness", with 'genuine' implicitly meaning: posted naturally by a human who wanted to talk about lug studs, as opposed to, say, posted by a bot, or by a human who had some other purpose. Unless she comes around to set me straight, that's still the interpretation of her post that makes the most sense to me. Then, the thing that made me wonder whether 'specious' was the word she really meant (and not, say, an autocorrect) was that I hadn't thought the post had any especially remarkable appearance of genuineness ... ... and that involves less of the basic "here's what it means" of the word, and more of the history that lives on to color its modern meanings: The obsolete sense 1 that was literally about a beautiful pleasing appearance isn't used anymore. You only need to know it if you want to read really old books where it was used that way, or you want to follow how the modern meanings developed. Obsolete or not in English, it is what the Latin origin literally meant, and still gives the word a shade of color. So you could, if you wanted, say "that argument seems specious" about just any old argument you find a flaw in. But you have lots of choices for describing any old argument you find a flaw in, and you could also prefer to hold 'specious' in reserve for the ones that at first impress you with their apparent beauty. The ones that get you thinking "Boom! Oh yeah! That settles the whole ... oh, wait ... no it doesn't, does it?". So I guess if I were to think "does this forum post look speciously genuine?", it'd most likely be about a post that had at first impressed me with how very genuine it seemed. I might not pull the word out just every time a post looked like spam. But these aren't "it's right or it's wrong" issues, they are word choice judgments that involve more than the "here's what it means" quickie definition of a word, and people can make those judgments differently. When I first asked Kris (seems so long ago) whether she chose 'specious' on purpose, or maybe chose 'suspicious' and got autocorrected or something, I wasn't asking a rhetorical or gotcha question. I was curious, because I know Kris also shows care in word usage. I figured 'suspicious' would also have been a fitting choice with fewer subtleties, and I can totally imagine autocorrect replacing a mistyped totally-common word with a less-common one that has more-complicated shades of meaning. But Kris did confirm that 'specious' was her original choice, and then the thread turned into futurist maybe looking to gotcha me, and stuff.
