In a word: Tendentious

Each week The Sun's John McIntyre presents a moderately obscure but evocative word with which you may not be familiar — another brick to add to the wall of your working vocabulary. This week's word:

TENDENTIOUS

Most of us recognize when we are being taken for a ride. Particularly in political columns, sometimes in articles purporting to be impartial, and nearly always on the Internet, writers can be seen to advance a definite point of view, often slanting the issue rhetorically. Such writing is tendentious (pronounced ten-DEN-shus), advancing a point of view or agenda. It is not a term of praise.

The word has a common ancestry with tendency, an inclination to go in a particular direction. Both come from the Latin tendens, a participle of tendere, "to tend."

Example: While the author affected a tone of impartially weighing the evidence of the respective merits of evolution and creationism, his transparent intention to get creationism taught in the public schools rendered his argument a piece of tendentious rubbish.