unintention

plural unintentions

1. rareSomething that is unintentional.

   Living honestly with yourself under all circumstances is a major key in true happiness. And fate is the exactitude of unintentions.

   1997, “LOCKWOOD, NATALIE”, in The National Library of Poetry, edited by Melisa S. Mitchell, Through the Looking Glass, Owings Mills, Md.: Watermark Press, →ISBN, page 534, column 2

   5 more examples

   The frameup is an unconscious (occasionally semiconscious) mechanism. An unconscious mechanism is a kink in the mind that makes people do something without knowing why they do it, and often without knowing that they are doing it. It is the sub-rational act of a group, serving in this case, through a series of pointed unintentions, the ends of a governing class.

   1927, John Dos Passos, Facing the Chair: Story of the Americanization of Two Foreignborn Workmen, Boston, Mass.: Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee, page 55

   Inconsequence has a way of becoming consequential, and the most illogical sequences may lose their irrationality by merely becoming familiar. Thus, new unintentions emerge from an original lack of intent, and the process may continue indefinitely, with the same eyes never regarding the same film.

   1970, Sidney Peterson, “A Note on Comedy in Experimental Film”, in P. Adams Sitney, editor, Film Culture Reader, New York, N.Y.: Praeger Publishers, →LCCN, section five (Overviews and Theoretical Considerations), page 402

   But the cold, rational spirit of Constructivist sculpture was certainly not the goal of the Baroque penetration—its destruction, really—of classical mass and frontality. The sculptural void—more sympathetically developed by Moore, Hepworth (fig. 7–56), and Arp (fig. 7–5)—is better understood as an instance of the law of unintended consequences. Happily, the history of art records many such unintentions.

   1985, Edmund Burke Feldman, “[Sculpture] Holes, Voids, Apertures”, in Thinking About Art, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., →ISBN, page 313, column 2

   The Unintentions of a Framer / The story of George Washington’s role in the founding of our constitutional traditions is not one of unrelenting success. As President he aspired to much that went unfulfilled during his two terms in office. In several significant ways, in fact, constitutional practices developed quite differently from what he had envisioned. But even here, Washington’s role in the development of new and important constitutional forms was substantial, albeit unintended.

   1993, Glenn A. Phelps, George Washington and American Constitutionalism (American Political Thought), Lawrence, Kan.: University Press of Kansas, →ISBN, page 155

   What culpable innocence, for now we see / The point is poetry’s unreadability / Where unintentions couple and produce / Meanings unmeant and monsters on the loose / Less rational than that of Frankenstein / Who wished to be understood.

   1997, Charles Tomlinson, “[Epilogue (1997)] A Doggerel for My Seventieth Birthday”, in Selected Poems, 1955-1997, New York, N.Y.: New Directions Publishing Corporation, →ISBN, pages 221–222