misflip

present singular third person misflips · participle present misflipping · participle past misflipped · past misflipped

1. To flip badly or in error.

   Seeing a pretty girl in every window would cause a paperboy to misflip his papers, not because their watching made him nervous, but because their being in every window made him care less.

   2007, Henry Petroski, Paperboy: Confessions of a Future Engineer, page 270

   3 more examples

   As a result I had to print my speech in large block letters on the shirt boards with a black-felt pen. In flipping these over at appropriate points, I misflipped — and I "lost" one whole side, and with it a bunch of names I very much wanted to cite.

   2005, James Cagney, Cagney by Cagney, page 194

   An offending loaf was tossed over her shoulder among the potted plants; a misflipped potato pancake was scraped off the range and back into the pan; her false teeth were firmly readjusted in front of the camera.

   2011, Ann Wroe, Keith Colquhoun, Book of Obituaries, page 69

   Her code held up when the stakes were life and death — even when a misflipped switch triggered alarms that interrupted the astronaut's displays right as Apollo 11 approached the surface of the moon.

   2020, Joshua Sokol, “The Hidden Heroines of Chaos”, in Michio Kaku, Jaime Green, editors, The Best American Science and Nature Writing, page 293

plural misflips

1. An act of misflipping.

   The peninsula, unlike most of the Sounds country, had never been milled or burnt off or gone over by unwanted immigrants: aside from the legendary misflip in navigation, no errors had been made there.

   1968, Arena (Wellington, N.Z.). - Issues 69-81, page 2