Definition of "mismaneuver"
mismaneuver
verb
third-person singular simple present mismaneuvers, present participle mismaneuvering, simple past and past participle mismaneuvered
To maneuver in a way that has an unfortunate result.
Quotations
Maude Purvis was the granddaughter of an American Southern gentleman, Robert Louis Earle Purvis, who somehow mismaneuvered himself into association with the Yankees during the Civil War and quickly thereafter remaneuvered himself to distant Batavia where he found a happy and prosperous haven .
1956, American Universities Field Staff, Fieldstaff Reports: Southeast Asia series - Volumes 4-6, page 6
During the race on the Hudson, Vanderbilt in his excitement seized the wheel from the pilot and mismaneuvered his vessel, while Law, out of fuel, hurled furniture and costly fittings into the furnaces and so sailed on to win.
2014, Clifford Browder, The Money Game in Old New York: Daniel Drew and His Times, page 48
noun
countable and uncountable, plural mismaneuvers
(countable) A maneuver that does not go as intended.
Quotations
Or the so-called foolproof airplane that is so control-limited and inherently stable that it obviously "wants" to fly and will work itself out of any stall, mismaneuver or spin anyone puts it into — in the process settling itself back on a comfortable and even keel?
1999, Guy Murchie, The Seven Mysteries of Life, page 442
After two and a half years of political mismaneuvers, military bungling, expenditures estimated at 158 million dollars, and the death of twenty thousand men, Sheffey's prognosis was beginning to sound prophetic.
2003, Milton Gaither, American Educational History Revisited: A Critique of Progress, page 37
During those three hellish days at Gettysburg, General Robert E. Lee was badly suffering from a severe case of diarrhea after having eaten too many cherries, an indisposition—given his ill-considered and ultimately amateurishly fatal decision for the Confederacy to attack from the front (and relatively below) on July 3, 1863—that cost his army a victory that day, an incredible mismaneuver and unstrategic folly that became, as it turned out, the turning-point of the entire war that led to the full and final defeat of the South.
2017, Alexander Theroux, Einstein's Beets, page 514
(uncountable) The act of mismaneuvering.
Quotations
The Fifth Queen is like Verdi's Otello: made of miscalculation, mismaneuver, and mistake. Motive is a metaphor with its meaning sheathed like a dagger. It is one of Shakespeare's doubtful mystery plays. . For prose, it is the recovery of poetry itself.
2003, Martha Tuck Rozett, Constructing a World: Shakespeare's England and the New Historical Fiction, page 9