mistwist

present singular third person mistwists · participle present mistwisting · participle past mistwisted · past mistwisted

1. To twist incorrectly or by mistake.

   "The boys is all het up over the way they've been did in the game," he muttered, "an' if I was to butt in they'd likely mistwist my meanin'. […]"

   1911, David A. Curtis, Old Man Greenhut and His Friends, page 287

   2 more examples

   And as for the amelioration of the revenue in consonance with the changed and up to date conditions of the trade the Bureau has never been known to be guilty of any ideas in that direction with the possible exception of mistwisting the statutes to oppress the trade and hinder its development.

   1907, United States Tobacco Journal - Volume 68, page 4

   It is somehow reassuring to know that the machines can make mistakes—they mistwist, or drop, or otherwise foul up about five pretzels in every hundred.

   1958, Atkinson's Evening Post and Philadelphia Saturday News, page 96

plural mistwists

1. An instance of mistwisting.

   Walking and driving seem to be examples of muscular movement toward a goal in which a misstep or mistwist occurs once in millions or billions of instances.

   2003, Philip Julian Runkel, People as Living Things: The Psychology of Perceptual Control, page 169

   4 more examples

   There is a great square box in which glass that has been spoiled is cast aside, worthless through the single mistwist of a wrist perhaps, or perhaps a flaw is started in the early stages of transformation, that is not discovered until many dollars worth of work has been done upon the little square piece of glass that first came into the factory.

   1906 March, Alexander Hume Ford, “How the All-Seeing-Eye (Mechanical) is Made”, in New Age Magazine, volume 4, number 3, page 245

   To Pelagius, a personally irreproachable man according to what little view of him emerges from the shadows of personal obscurity, "sin" was not a basic mistwist in the human character. It represented momentary, isolated, individual acts of willful evil.

   1987, Martin E. Marty, A Short History of Christianity, page 127

   The angle of a small-angle grain boundary is generally limited to within ~10-15° mistilt or mistwist, which is close to the overlapping limit of dislocation.

   2014, Nobuo Tanaka, Scanning Transmission Electron Microscopy Of Nanomaterials, page 121

   Once or twice he narrowly missed: the full flavor of sleep was right there on his palate, only to vaporize in a mistwist of the neck or a voice adrift on the ward.

   2015, Larry Duberstein, Postcards from Pinsk