wiredrawn

• The other letter consists of the usual wiredrawn argument for fatalism. —  Utopia of Usurers and Other Essays
• As, I assure you, were I to fill the remainder, all I should say would be terribly wiredrawn, do excuse me: you shall hear an ample detail of the first Admiral Vernon that springs out of our —  The Letters of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford — Volume 2
• The thought is wiredrawn to inanity, but the words make it perfectly clear that the poet was the only one of the lady's lovers -- to the definite exclusion of all others -- whose name justified the quibbling pretence of identity with the 'will' which controls her being. —  A Life of William Shakespeare with portraits and facsimiles
• Here was no pindling fowl that had taken the veil and lived the cloistered life; here was no wiredrawn and trained-down cross-country turkey, but a lusty giant of a bird that would have been a cassowary, probably, or an emu, if he had lived, his bosom a white mountain of lusciousness, his interior a Golconda and not a Golgotha. —  Cobb's Bill-of-Fare
• If a theorist chooses to assume, that these secondary causes, under certain conditions, which we never have seen, and never can see, realized, might produce very extraordinary results, might even fully account for the wonderful effects in question, we have a right to say, in reply, that he is dealing in pure speculation and hypothesis; that, having had no experience under the conditions or postulates of his theory, he is necessarily _speaking from_ ignorance and _appealing_ to ignorance; that, even if we could not point out a single difficulty, a single false assumption, in his whole scheme and argument, it would still remain a mere hypothesis, alike incapable of proof or disproof; and that, at the best, the arguments brought against it must be of nearly the same wiredrawn, speculative, and far-fetched character with those adduced in its support. —  A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation'

Allen's Synonyms and Antonyms