Conflate

To “conflate” (kun-FLATE) – from the Latin for “fuse together” – is to combine different elements.

Example (as used by Don Hauptman today): “Recently, a friend of mine, attempting to convey the idea that someone was naive, referred in an article to ‘a babe in the manger.’ She had, I suspect, conflated the image of an innocent infant (from the story of the birth of Jesus) with the expression ‘a dog in the manger’ (from one of Aesop’s fables).”

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