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Monday 20 February 2012

Entry: perfidiously (adj.)


In context: "But once Marathe had committed not just to pretend to betray his Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents in order to secure advanced medical care for the medical needs of his wife, but to in truth do this - betray, perfidiously: now pretending only to M. Fortier and his A.F.R. superiors that he was merely pretending to feed some betraying information to B.S.S. - once this decision, Marathe was without all power, served now at the pleasures of the power of Steeply and the B.S.S. of Hugh Steeply: and now they spoke mostly the U.S.A. English of Steeply's preference.


Definition: In a perfidious manner; treacherously. 

To assist,   perfidious (adj. and n.): Characterized by perfidy; guilty of breaking faith or violating confidence; deliberately faithless; treacherous. Also occas. as n.: a perfidious person.



Other: This was a long weekend, both temporally and first-person subjective. With that in mind, I'm super happy to have a great set of words to be working through.


Okay, back to the task: trying to parse some of Wallace's prose without the aid of caffeine (or other) can be difficult.  It's kind of a shame that none of the OED's historical usages are all that interesting.


SNOOT score: 3


Page: 89
 
Source: Oxford English Dictionary



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