mispursue

English

Etymology

mis- +‎ pursue

Verb

mispursue (third-person singular simple present mispursues, present participle mispursuing, simple past and past participle mispursued)

1. To pursue in the wrong way.
   • 1954, Saturday Review - Volume 37, page 36:

     A study, complete with statistics and history, of the American legal profession as it has been pursued and mispursued in the past couple of hundred years.

   • 1996, John Richardson, Nietzsche's System, page 189:

     Such struggle is mispursued when one tries to establish one's viewpoint as uniquely true and to exclude the other's as simply false.

   • 2015, Christopher Hughes, Aquinas on Being, Goodness, and God:

     Also, I should have thought that, for Aquinas, all want and pursue happiness, but only the wise want and pursue what happiness consists in: the unwise want and pursue but do not attain happiness, because they are under a misapprehension about what it consists in (e.g., they think it consists in riches, or honor, or the delights of the flesh, or ...), and so “mispursue” happiness, by pursuing things which won't in fact, if attained, bring them happiness (although the mispursuers of happiness think they will).