captious • \ˈkap-shəs\ • adjective
: tending to find and call attention to faults
The word captious has appeared in one New York Times article in the past three years, on April 4, 2014, in the theater review “No Rest for the Weary” by Ben Brantley:
As portrayed by Denzel Washington in Kenny Leon’s disarmingly relaxed revival of Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” — which opened on Thursday night at the Ethel Barrymore Theater — Walter appears worn down, worn out and about ready to crawl into bed for good. Frankly, he looks a whole lot older than you probably remember him.
… Ms. Jackson’s Lena, for example, is not the customary tower of saintly strength. She can be a captious and irritable mother-in-law to Ruth, and you feel the friction between the dominating women in Walter’s life. The beautiful Ms. Okonedo (an Oscar nominee for “Hotel Rwanda”) offers us a more patently fragile, breakable Ruth than usual.
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