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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

• Did you watch that recent (April 17) and shocking segment on “60 Minutes” about how life insurance companies are shortchanging many policy holders? What particularly outraged this author, and perhaps millions of other viewers, was the finding that even if an insurance company is aware of a policy holder's death (such as from the Social Security Death Master File), it will not initiate payment of due benefits unless a beneficiary comes forward. And because it's not uncommon for a beneficiary to be unaware of a policy, the death benefit that has come due on millions of policies--hundreds of thousands in Florida alone--has never been paid. Another disappointing aspect of that news story: this perfidiousness is built into the business model of even our most “prestigious” insurance companies.

Workplace Examples

• Come on, withdrawing my support for Tiffany'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”
• 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 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
• Did you know there is an international law that bans the “killing, injuring, or capturing of an adversary by resorting to perfidy”? For instance, during hostilities, it is illegal for one side to fly the white flag of surrender and then, after having lulled the other side into complacency, launch a surprise attack.

© 2017 V.J. Singal
No part of this may be reproduced in any form without written permission of the author.

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