conflation

[kuhn-fley-shuhn]

noun

1. the process or result of fusing items into one entity; fusion; amalgamation.

2. Bibliography.

   1. the combination of two variant texts into a new one.

   2. the text resulting from such a combination.

Word History and Origins

Origin of conflation¹

First recorded in 1400–50; late Middle English word from Late Latin word conflātiō. See conflate, -ion

Example Sentences

The type of violence covered in the new report is a “conflation of two public health and public safety crises” — intimate partner violence and suicide.

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What felt absurd in 2013 looks uncannily familiar now: the obsession with purity, the conflation of wellness with luxury, the belief that food is never just food but a lifestyle choice, a status symbol, a moral performance.

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This conflation of gender orthodoxy with American prosperity is popular for a frustratingly simple reason: A politics which refuses to engage with a rigorous economic analysis in the face of parabolic wealth and income inequality has no choice but to attribute the creeping void of American precarity to cultural explanations instead.

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His professional unease is echoed by the novel’s gently surreal bending of time and space and its metaphorical conflation of life and film.

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And the successful conflation of “Palestinian” with “terrorist” was all it took for some Americans to embrace Donald Trump’s suggestion that Gaza should be cleared of its people and turned into the “Riviera of the Middle East” for Israelis, Americans, and foreign tourists.

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Related Words

• fusion 
• pluralism