conflation

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• "The Buffy-Riley Leitmotif and Musical Evidence for the Romantic Conflation of Angel and Riley" [No idea what that means, really, but I like the word conflation.] • "'Here Endeth the Lesson': Spike's Torturous Romances and Life Laid Bare"

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Definitions (5)

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  1. The blowing of two or more musical instruments together. The sweetest and best harmony is, when every part or instrument is not heard by itself, but a conflation of them all. Bacon, Nat. Hist., § 225.
  2. A melting or casting of metal. Johnson. [Rare in senses 1 and 2.]
  3. In diplomatics: An inadvertent combination of two readings of the same passage, so as to produce a new reading different from either. Suppose that a given line of a copy has been affected by some scribe's stupidity, so as materially to change the sense without affecting the length (as by the substitution of two or three letters from a wrong line), and that by the subsequent correction of the passage two readings have been placed in close relation, it frequently happens that the real line and the erroneous line which is equal in length to it both combine to form a new reading, which has thus increased the text by one of its own lines. This phenomenon is known by the name of conflation. It is well known that the most powerful part of Dr. Hort's great Introduction to the New Testament consists in the exposition of eight cases of conflation in the early texts of Mark and Luke. Amer. Jour. Philol., VI. 33.
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Examples (50)

  • That is, a few lines written in either genre can have a profound impact, either in the context of a software operating system or in the context of the human psyche—which, I would argue, are not as different as you might think The use of the word conflation is deliberate, in that equating poetry to code in any literal sense is indeed a stretch if not an error. —  GUDMagazineIssue0::Spring2007
  • Finally, at a Halloween barbecue, Mike Getz delivers a semicoherent thesis about the plants, before a veritable holocaust—either imagined or actual—overtakes the whole neighborhood Summarized thus, the book sounds like a conflation of Ray Bradbury, Henry Kuttner, and H. P. Lovecraft. —  Asimov's SF, Feb 2002
  • This conflation, he suggests, results in seeing the structure as preceding its elements and reproducing them. —  Kafila
  • In the bloggers defense, they didn't know just significant an error of data conflation was made by the author of the article, Gina Cavallaro. —  Argghhh! The Home Of Two Of Jonah's Military Guys..
  • Another achievement of the Ortega government is the conflation, and centralized encouragement of a free market system in Nicaragua while at the same time managing to talk favorably about socialism. —  Council on Hemispheric Affairs
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Etymologies (1)

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  1. = Spanish conflacion, from Late Latin conflatio(n-), from Latin conflare, past participle conflatus, blow together: see conflate, v.
 

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