perversely
/pəˈvəːsli
/adverb
1In a way that shows a deliberate and obstinate desire to behave in an unreasonable or unacceptable manner: the group perversely refused to tour until well past their peak the minister had acted perversely in failing to publish the report...
- For critics for whom 'reason' is always partisan and coercive, such an aspiration must seem perversely self-destructive.
- She had wanted them to choose a Shakespeare play or the Bible, but Sam had perversely chosen the dictionary.
- He perversely emphasized the differences rather than the similarities of timbre between instruments and even wrote an elaborate justification of this wrong-headedness.
2In a manner contrary to what is expected or accepted: [as submodifier]: he was perversely proud of his parochial background [sentence adverb]: perhaps perversely, it was his niceness that turned some people against him...
- Spectacles of suffering are perversely part of our entertainment culture.
- Perversely, many chapters deal in detail with individual people who can only be described as extraordinary.
- Even useless hacks may come, perversely enough, to be valued for the purity of their uselessness.