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Perfidious

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(pronounced per-fid-ee-us)  adjective

Definition

characterized by perfidy; treacherous; faithless; untrustworthy.

Perfidy  (pronounced puhr-fih-dee) noun  =  deliberate breach of faith; betrayal or violation of trust; treachery; deceitfulness.

Main Example

• The high-profile arrest of two Bear Stearns executives on a charge of securities fraud was extremely reminiscent of widely broadcast scenes just a few years earlier, when similarly perfidious top management from several major corporations, including Enron, WorldCom, and Tyco, were handcuffed in public and led away by federal agents.

Workplace Examples

• Come on, withdrawing my support for Shelly's plan is not an act of faithlessness or perfidy. Her proposal has undergone so many revisions it's barely recognizable from what it originally represented.
• Okay, here is my favorite "what if" scenario for students of World War II history: How might things have turned out if Adolf Hitler had stuck to his nonaggression pact with Stalin, and not ordered that perfidious and self-destructive attack on the Soviet Union in 1941?

Other Examples

• a cutthroat workplace riven by backstabbing, undermining, one-upping, and other perfidious behavior
• while he was New York's attorney general, Eliot Spitzer helping to uncover a culture of perfidy in the world of Wall Street: at many brokerage houses, top analysts routinely and perfidiously recommended stocks that they privately regarded as "junk"
• in Congo's Virunga National Park--home of the world's last remaining mountain gorillas--the perfidy of a senior park ranger who, motivated by his personal business interests, masterminded the massacre of several of the precious apes that he was charged to protect
• many reporters and analysts blaming the faulty intelligence regarding Saddam Hussein's WMDs on the ambitious Ahmed Chalabi who, after winning the trust of the U.S., perfidiously planted his henchmen as "reliable Iraqi informants" and fed false information to the CIA
• sometimes, to end a long-festering dispute such as that in the Middle East, secret talks between the two warring parties being the only solution, even though it may be seen as perfidious after respective leaders publicly vowed not to have any truck with the other side

© 2008 V.J. Singal

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