This may come as news to some of White's would-be shock troops, who generally haven't announced their hostile intentions to art and the imagination, but White sees their pernicious effects spreading across contemporary American life.
Dioxins are among the more pernicious toxins getting spread around this way, for a number of reasons: they have adverse effects even in very small amounts, they persist in the environment for a long time without breaking down and they tend to accumulate in living tissue over time.
But like some pernicious cancer, it's spreading.
Within the context of a psychological thriller, Mr. Kon explores the crisis of Japanese women entrapped by the crippling shojo image, which is seen as spreading its pernicious influence over several generations.
The gun lobby is spreading the pernicious falsehood that a background check will lead to a gun registry, and a registry will lead to a knock on the front door by a government SWAT team intent on confiscating the nation's weapons.
Perhaps the most pernicious myth that has been spread concerns the cancellation of the video link with Salman.
Morozov goes on to quote Golnaz Esfandiari, a Radio Free Europe Iran correspondent, in "deploring Twitter's pernicious complicity in allowing rumours to spread" in Iran during the crisis.
Our most daunting global health crisis is a pernicious, wasting disease that can be spread by a simple cough or sneeze and has been infecting humans since 4,000 B.C. Tuberculosis (TB) -- a treatable and curable condition -- continues to grow in prevalence, mostly in the developing world, but even in pockets throughout Europe.
There is a pernicious and highly regrettable consequence of spreading so broadly a misunderstanding that the right to a lawyer and silence may depend on citizenship status.
However, one minister complained that "the mischief arising from the spreading of such a pernicious publication [as The Age of Reason] was infinitely greater than any that could spring from limited suffrage and septennial parliaments" (other popular reform causes).
