mismaneuver

• mismaneuvre, mismanoeuver, mismanoeuvre

From mis- +‎ maneuver.

mismaneuver (third-person singular simple present mismaneuvers, present participle mismaneuvering, simple past and past participle mismaneuvered)

1. To maneuver in a way that has an unfortunate result.
   • 1956, American Universities Field Staff, Fieldstaff Reports: Southeast Asia series - Volumes 4-6, page 6:

     Maude Purvis was the granddaughter of an American Southern gentleman, Robert Louis Earle Purvis, who somehow mismaneuvered himself into association with the Yankees during the Civil War and quickly thereafter remaneuvered himself to distant Batavia where he found a happy and prosperous haven .

   • 1971, Neal Cassady, The First Third, page 117:

     Mr. Frank prematurely ended his sad and spotty career in a Rocky Mountain ravine, smashed inside the stolen car he'd drunkenly mismaneuvered around a cliff curve.

   • 1987, Jennifer Curtiss Gage, Dominique Rolin, The Deathday Cake, page 122:

     Victory eludes me, I must have misjudged or mismaneuvered.

   • 2014, Clifford Browder, The Money Game in Old New York: Daniel Drew and His Times, page 48:

     During the race on the Hudson, Vanderbilt in his excitement seized the wheel from the pilot and mismaneuvered his vessel, while Law, out of fuel, hurled furniture and costly fittings into the furnaces and so sailed on to win.

mismaneuver (countable and uncountable, plural mismaneuvers)

1. (countable) A maneuver that does not go as intended.
   • 1989, Per Bruun, Port Engineering, page 186:

     The second is the probability of a mismaneuver in the face of an impending accident.

   • 1999, Guy Murchie, The Seven Mysteries of Life, page 442:

     Or the so-called foolproof airplane that is so control-limited and inherently stable that it obviously "wants" to fly and will work itself out of any stall, mismaneuver or spin anyone puts it into — in the process settling itself back on a comfortable and even keel?

   • 2003, Milton Gaither, American Educational History Revisited: A Critique of Progress, page 37:

     After two and a half years of political mismaneuvers, military bungling, expenditures estimated at 158 million dollars, and the death of twenty thousand men, Sheffey's prognosis was beginning to sound prophetic.

   • 2017, Alexander Theroux, Einstein's Beets, page 514:

     During those three hellish days at Gettysburg, General Robert E. Lee was badly suffering from a severe case of diarrhea after having eaten too many cherries, an indisposition—given his ill-considered and ultimately amateurishly fatal decision for the Confederacy to attack from the front (and relatively below) on July 3, 1863—that cost his army a victory that day, an incredible mismaneuver and unstrategic folly that became, as it turned out, the turning-point of the entire war that led to the full and final defeat of the South.

2. (uncountable) The act of mismaneuvering.
   • 1977, Ohio State University. Commission on Women and Minorities, Report, page 16:

     Through political maneuver (or mismaneuver) the act, in its full civil rights thrust, was joined to outlaw both race and sex discrimination in its coverage, but only in its title in regards to employment.

   • 1982 ·, IABSE Reports - Volume 42, page 91:

     The frequency of a ship collision with a fixed object or a ship depends on the hypothetical frequency of ship collision with fixed autopilots and the probability of mismaneuver.

   • 2003, Martha Tuck Rozett, Constructing a World: Shakespeare's England and the New Historical Fiction, page 9:

     The Fifth Queen is like Verdi's Otello: made of miscalculation, mismaneuver, and mistake. Motive is a metaphor with its meaning sheathed like a dagger. It is one of Shakespeare's doubtful mystery plays. . . . For prose, it is the recovery of poetry itself.

• mismaneuvre