Adjective

(en adjective)

Not noble; unbecoming true honor or dignity; mean; unworthy; fake or deceptive.

Not ingenuous; not frank or open; uncandid; unworthily or meanly artful.

* 1726 , , The Poems of Alexander Pope: The Odyssey of Homer. Books XIII-XXIV , edited by Maynard Mack, Methuen, 1969, volume 10, page 378:

I am not so vain as to think these Remarks free from faults, nor so disingenuous as not to confess them:

Assuming a pose of naivete to make a point or for deception.

* {{quote-magazine, date=2012-03

, author=William E. Carter, Merri Sue Carter , title=The British Longitude Act Reconsidered , volume=100, issue=2, page=87 , magazine= citation , passage=But was it responsible governance to pass the Longitude Act without other efforts to protect British seamen? Or might it have been subterfuge—a disingenuous attempt to shift attention away from the realities of their life at sea.}}

Adjective

(en adjective)

Not direct; roundabout; deceiving; setting a trap; confusing.

* '>citation

Indirect' messages permit communicative contacts when,
without them, the alternatives would be total inhibition, si-
lence, and solitude on the one hand, or, on the other, com-
municative behavior that is direct, offensive, and hence
forbidden. This is a painful choice. In actual practice, neither
alternative is likely to result in the gratification of personal or
sexual needs. In this dilemma, ' indirect communications pro-
vide a useful compromise. As an early move in the dating
game, the young man might invite the young woman to dinner
or to the movies. These communications are polyvalent: both
the invitation and the response to it have several "levels" of
meaning. One is the level of the overt message—that is,
whether they will have dinner together, go to a movie, and so
forth. Another, more covert, level pertains to the question of
sexual activity: acceptance of the dinner invitation implies
that sexual overtures might perhaps follow. Conversely, rejec-
tion of the invitation means not only refusal of companionship
for dinner but also of the possibility of further sexual explora-
tion. There may be still other levels of meaning. For example,
acceptance of the dinner invitation may be interpreted as a
sign of personal or sexual worth and hence grounds for
increased self-esteem, whereas its rejection may mean the
opposite and generate feelings of worthlessness.