misflip

English

Etymology

From mis- +‎ flip.

Pronunciation

• (verb) IPA^(key): /mɪsˈflɪp/
• (noun) IPA^(key): /ˈmɪsflɪp/

Verb

misflip (third-person singular simple present misflips, present participle misflipping, simple past and past participle misflipped)

1. To flip badly or in error.
   • 2005, James Cagney, Cagney by Cagney, page 194:

     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.

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

     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.

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

     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.

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

     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.

Noun

misflip (plural misflips)

1. An act of misflipping.
   • 1968, Arena (Wellington, N.Z.). - Issues 69-81, page 2:

     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.

Anagrams

• flipism