misreflect

English

Etymology

mis- +‎ reflect

Verb

misreflect (third-person singular simple present misreflects, present participle misreflecting, simple past and past participle misreflected)

1. To mirror inaccurately; to reflect a distorted image of.
   • 1661, Sir Samuel Tuke, The Adventures of Five Hours:

     To the censorious world, who like false glasses Mingling their own irregular figures, Misreflect the object, I fhall appear Some finful woman, sold to infamy.

   • 1968, John Irving, Setting Free the Bears:

     I could see no more of her face that the sharp bridge of her nose. Except what I caught misreflected in the hair dryer – her enlarged ear.

   • 1972, Margaret Drabble, The Needle's Eye:

     he could create for himself an ordered darkness, an equality of misery, a justice in the sharing of the darkness, his own hole, by right, in that darkness, and his sense of light, his illuminations, were an evolutionary freak, an artificial glow that had etiolated him into hopeless pale unnatural underground yellow green deformities, a light misreflected through some unintended chink, too far away for such low creatures ever to reach it and flourish by it.

   • 2012, The Speed Chronicles:

     Does your life ever feel like a continuum of one aberration, misreflected in a series of cracked rearview mirrors?

2. To present an inaccurate description of; to give an inaccurate impression of.
   • 1963, California Public Utilities Commission, Investigation on the Commission's Own Motion Into the Rates, Tolls, Rules, Charges, Operations, Practices, Contracts, Service and Facilities of the Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Company, page 310:

     Lest this record misreflect what the testimony was, I understood that the witness was talking in that percentage about failures, which would of course include dialing errors.

   • 1971, California. Office of the Attorney General, Proposed Guidelines for the Preparation and Evaluation of Environmental Impact Statements Under the California Environmental Quality Act of 1970, page 7:

     The final sentence of the policy statement appears also to misreflect the emphasis of the Act.

   • 1990, Casey D. Blitt, Monitoring in Anesthesia and Critical Care Medicine, page 211:

     In cardiovascular crises acute fast phenomena frequently dominate the issues of outcome; as a consequence, clinical manifestations often lag seriously behind and tend to misreflect the actual underlying pathophysiology.

   • 1974, United States. Congress. House. Committee on the Judiciary, Nomination of Nelson A. Rockefeller to be Vice President of the United States, page 554:

     He continually made references to some request that he come to consut with the prisoners which we thought was sidetracking the issue, and his testimony before the Senate committee seems to confirm the fact in my mind that he continue to try to misrepresent or misreflect what actually happened.

   • 2004, Symposium: Equality, Privacy and Lesbian and Gay Rights After Lawrence V. Texas, page 1086:

     Its agenda is not reducing exceptions to sex-based default rules but the rules themselves; not just generalizations that misreflect reality, but generalizations that become reality.

3. To think about in a distorted way
   • 1990, Reinhardt Grossmann, The Fourth Way: A Theory of Knowledge, page 117:

     The gist of this horribly repugnant scene is that a person can be forced, because of the threat of unbearable pain, to misreflect upon his perceptions.