Today, a lot of people use "perfidy" and "perfidious" only as vague condemnations that straddle the territory between "pernicious" and "invidious".
Vice-President Dick Cheney viewed the move by Britain — "perfidious Albion," as he put it — as "a stab in the back," according to a former senior intelligence official.
That Lord Strathclyde had been just as perfidious did not prevent his preferment.
Since 2007, a widely used high school history textbook for teachers, developed by the Kremlin, has openly praised Stalin's wartime leadership and condemned Allied behavior as perfidious.
After stating earlier this week that "politics have to reassert primacy over the financial markets", she said that the "speculators are our opponents" and described the banks as "perfidious".
Whereas in earlier crises during the papacy many in the Vatican hierarchy dismissed criticism as perfidious outside attacks, after the leaks they more openly acknowledged that the lumbering bureaucracy needed improving.
By "last night" he meant 3 A.M., and by "women's health" he didn't even mean abortion, or not directly; our government may be about to shut down because of Republicans who regard it as perfidious that Planned Parenthood provides cancer screenings for lower-income women.
