conflate

present singular third person conflates · participle present conflating · participle past conflated · past conflated

1. To combine or mix together.

   Synonyms: mix, blend, coalesce, commingle, flux, immix, merge, amalgamate

2. broadlyTo fail to properly distinguish or keep separate (things); to mistakenly treat (them) as equivalent.

   Near-synonym: confuse

   2 more examples

   “Bacon was Lord Chancellor of England and the first European to experiment with gunpowder.” — “No, you are conflating Francis Bacon and Roger Bacon.”

   But as Covid wore on, and all of this not-really-reading took on an ever more breathless quality, it became clear that we were being not confused but conflated, treated as one interchangeable Naomi.

   2023, Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, Penguin, →ISBN, page 39

   Synonyms: mix up, lump together

3. broadlyTo deliberately draw a false equivalence or association, typically in a tacit or implicit manner as propaganda and/or an intentional distortion or misrepresentation of the subject matter.

   “We must stop conflating selectivity with excellence. We must stop correlating prestige with privilege,” he said.

   2022 September 12, Deidre McPhillips, “Critiques mount around popular annual college rankings”, in CNN

   3 more examples

   But in reality, the order simply furthers the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant policies by continuing to conflate immigration issues with criminal ones.

   2018 June 25, Shan Wu, “The real story behind Trump’s immigration executive order”, in CNN

   But again, this conflates global geographic variation with race, says Alan Goodman, a biological anthropologist at Hampshire College.

   2020 August 18, “Your big questions about race, answered”, in CNN

   Climate skeptics have conflated the two for years, for example, pointing to cold winter weather as proof that global warming is a hoax, most likely to play on people’s confusion about the two.

   2020 September 15, Brandon Miller and Judson Jones, “Climate is not weather: Trump continues to get the two conflated”, in CNN

1. not comparablebiblical criticismCombining elements from multiple versions of the same text.

   Why the redactor created this conflate version, despite its inconsistencies, is a matter of conjecture.

   1999, Emanuel Tov, The Greek and Hebrew Bible: Collected Essays on the Septuagint

plural conflates

1. biblical criticismA conflate text, one which conflates multiple version of a text together.