Word: mistakenness
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Pneumonic plague is the greatest menace. Reason: it alone can be transmitted directly from one person to another without the help of fleas. Like septicemic plague, it is difficult to diagnose and is not infrequently mistaken for other diseases. Hence U.S. mortality records probably do not show how often the plague has killed...
...fact, some readers may feel that Author Huie has mistaken his calling, that he is a better reporter than novelist...
...unknown in 1781, when the Royal Society decided that Naturalist Smeathman was heat-crazy when he reported that tropical termites build nests ten to 35 ft. high (sometimes miscalled ant-hills), the largest structures built by any animal except man. In the U.S. the work of termites was long mistaken for that of fungi and dry-rot which usually follow their riddlings...
Visitors to Washington last week who wandered into the quiet, grassy quadrangle enclosed by American Red Cross headquarters might have mistaken it for a college campus. The Red Cross was runing a "war college," complete with lecturers and students lolling on outdoor benches. Its college was the pinnacle of a vast educational system that extended into every U.S. hamlet...
What the replies would allege in self-justification or palliation was anybody's guess, and guess everybody did. Buenos Aires newspapers sarcastically guessed that the German sub-commander had mistaken the sky-blue-&-white markings of nonbelligerent Argentina for the medium-blue-&-white markings of belligerent Honduras, that he had failed to perceive 4-ft.-high letters reading REP. ARGENTINA. Best guess was that Germany and Argentina would repeat the routine following the 1940 torpedoing of the Argentine merchantman Uruguay off the Spanish coast: Argentina protested; Germany's reply was accepted; neither was ever published...