misoccupy

From mis- +‎ occupy.

misoccupy (third-person singular simple present misoccupies, present participle misoccupying, simple past and past participle misoccupied)

1. To occupy with something inappropriate; to focus or spend on something unworthy.
   • 1861 Spetember, “Relics of Early Celtic Literature”, in The Dublin University Magazine: A Literary and Political Journal, volume 58, number 345, page 354:

     It may well be supposed that these grave religious writers would look on it as a profanation to waste valuable ink and parchment, and misoccupy their own precious time, in perpetuating the useless, heathenish, and often lewd fictions, which they would gladly see banished from the memory of the human race.

   • 1880, B. Solymos, Desert Life: Recollections of an Expedition in the Soudan, page 90:

     Let them not be idle, or misoccupied.

   • 1977, Gerald Thomas, The Tall Tale and Philippe D'Alcripe, page 81:

     It is not to be misused, like other books full of mad doctrine and chatter which misoccupy your mind with their beggarly pedantry, so grasp this volume of books of finely invented truth and with your eyes open, like dogs hunting for fleas;

   • 2016, Michael du Preez, Jeremy Dronfield, Dr James Barry: A Woman Ahead of Her Time:

     Their 'brutal persecutions', he told his friend and patron the Earl of Buchan, were 'unceasingly contrived to distract & misoccupy my attention':

2. To fill with something inappropriate; to provide the wrong contents for.
   • 1905, Emma Florence Langdon, The Cripple Creek Strike, page 165:

     Desert you the misoccupied chair of justice arbitrator, the position that should be occupied by honor and contaminate not the air of heaven with the name of liberty, freedom and justice befouled by your construction.

   • 1981, The life and art of James Barry, page 139:

     He deplored the fact that Chambers rather than someone like Thomas Sandby had been commissioned to build Somerset House, and he also audaciously argued that architects like Chambers had been more interested in filling their pockets than in promoting the grand style by causing the interior of buildings to be "frittered and broken by stucco ornaments of griffins, cobwebs, honey-suckles, pannels, and such like insipid, not to say disgusting trash, as misoccupy all the space around us, which ought to have been wisely and happily reserved for those highly cultivated efforts of Painting and Sculpture, so worthy the national reputation.

   • 1998, Cynthia Wall, The Literary and Cultural Spaces of Restoration London, page 178:

     To misoccupy the spaces of shop and church is as self-destructive as avoiding them.