Something is said to be harmful when it has a highly harmful or toxic component. In this way, the venom of a snake or certain toxic substances such as hemlock are deleterious. As for the word, it comes from the cult Latin deleterius and which in turn derives from the Greek word deleterios, which can be translated as destroyer.
A rare word in everyday language
Deleterious is a cultured way of referring to something harmful because of its damaging capacity. In everyday life other more colloquial words are used, such as bad, insane, dangerous, pernicious, deadly, harmful or toxic.
Different uses of the term
Certain ideas are considered deleterious, as they exert a negative influence on others. Deleterious ideas are valued as the germ of vicious attitudes or immoral behaviors.
Like most cultured words, the word deleterious is used in contexts of language that are far removed from ordinary communication and in this sense, in poetic language, one could speak of a deleterious sadness, that is, a sadness accompanied by a harmful and destructive component. .
In zoology we speak of deleterious animals, such as some arachnids, certain species of snakes or frogs or some jellyfish. These animals have toxic substances in their body and use them as a defense weapon
From a scientific point of view, the study of poisonous substances is known as toxicology
This discipline studies the chemical substances that potentially produce some type of physiological alteration. Generally, the toxins that affect the body are exogenous, that is, they do not come from the body itself. In this way, harmful or toxic substances can refer to fields such as forensic, clinical, environmental toxicology or the study of food.
In the study of genes, researchers have detected that some of them do not have a normal inheritance pattern and, consequently, produce alterations. In the terminology of genetics we speak of lethal genes and deleterious genes.
As its name suggests, the lethal are those that cause death or trigger serious diseases. The deleterious genes are not so serious but they produce physical limitations, such as hemophilia, albinism, Hungtintong disease. This is because certain genes alter the phenotype in hereditary transmission, that is, the physical traits of an individual.
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