unintention
Language: English
Part of speech: noun
Forms: form: unintentions
Etymology: Back-formation from unintentional.
Senses: examples: text: The frameup is an unconscious (occasionally semiconscious) mechanism. An unconscious mechanism is a kink in the mind that makes people do something without knowing why they do it, and often without knowing that they are doing it. It is the sub-rational act of a group, serving in this case, through a series of pointed unintentions, the ends of a governing class.
ref: 1927, John Dos Passos, Facing the Chair: Story of the Americanization of Two Foreignborn Workmen, Boston, Mass.: Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee, page 55:
text: Inconsequence has a way of becoming consequential, and the most illogical sequences may lose their irrationality by merely becoming familiar. Thus, new unintentions emerge from an original lack of intent, and the process may continue indefinitely, with the same eyes never regarding the same film.
ref: 1970, Sidney Peterson, “A Note on Comedy in Experimental Film”, in P. Adams Sitney, editor, Film Culture Reader, New York, N.Y.: Praeger Publishers, →LCCN, section five (Overviews and Theoretical Considerations), page 402:
text: But the cold, rational spirit of Constructivist sculpture was certainly not the goal of the Baroque penetration—its destruction, really—of classical mass and frontality. The sculptural void—more sympathetically developed by Moore, Hepworth (fig. 7–56), and Arp (fig. 7–5)—is better understood as an instance of the law of unintended consequences. Happily, the history of art records many such unintentions.
ref: 1985, Edmund Burke Feldman, “[Sculpture] Holes, Voids, Apertures”, in Thinking About Art, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., →ISBN, page 313, column 2:
text: The Unintentions of a Framer / The story of George Washington’s role in the founding of our constitutional traditions is not one of unrelenting success. As President he aspired to much that went unfulfilled during his two terms in office. In several significant ways, in fact, constitutional practices developed quite differently from what he had envisioned. But even here, Washington’s role in the development of new and important constitutional forms was substantial, albeit unintended.
ref: 1993, Glenn A. Phelps, George Washington and American Constitutionalism (American Political Thought), Lawrence, Kan.: University Press of Kansas, →ISBN, page 155:
text: What culpable innocence, for now we see / The point is poetry’s unreadability / Where unintentions couple and produce / Meanings unmeant and monsters on the loose / Less rational than that of Frankenstein / Who wished to be understood.
ref: 1997, Charles Tomlinson, “[Epilogue (1997)] A Doggerel for My Seventieth Birthday”, in Selected Poems, 1955-1997, New York, N.Y.: New Directions Publishing Corporation, →ISBN, pages 221–222:
text: Living honestly with yourself under all circumstances is a major key in true happiness. And fate is the exactitude of unintentions.
ref: 1997, “LOCKWOOD, NATALIE”, in The National Library of Poetry, edited by Melisa S. Mitchell, Through the Looking Glass, Owings Mills, Md.: Watermark Press, →ISBN, page 534, column 2:
text: The play exemplifies the potential gap between the effective realization of a speaker’s intention and the actual consequences of her speech acts, and allows us to consider the reasons why some speakers are more successful than others. It also demonstrates the multiplicity and uncontrollability of perlocutionary effects associated with utterances, as illustrated by Abigail’s accusation and Tituba’s subsequent ‘confession’. We are in the privileged position of being aware of the intentions (and ‘unintentions’) of the characters, something which is not always possible in everyday conversation.
ref: 1998, Valerie Lowe, “‘Unhappy’ confessions in The Crucible: a pragmatic explanation”, in Jonathan Culpeper, Mick Short, Peter Verdonk, editors, Exploring the Language of Drama: From Text to Context (Interface), London; New York, N.Y.: Routledge, →ISBN, page 139:
text: Reach out your good hand. Try and touch. Tables and shelves and gnomes and whirligigs of all description. A phantasmic, freakish familiar gallery of your own unintentions. / “I was supposed to be a pilot. This all never should have happened.”
ref: 2001, Chris Lynch, Freewill, London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, published 2004, →ISBN, page 108:
text: If the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, what road is paved with unintentions?
ref: 2003, Michael Flynn, The Wreck of The River of Stars, New York, N.Y.: Tor, →ISBN, page 391:
text: The suggestion is that smog should be considered part of the built environment, as material culture; however, it has a negative quality. It is the product of “human unintentions” and lack of knowledge.
ref: 2004, Joshua Dunsby, “Localizing Smog: Transgressions in the Therapeutic Landscape”, in E. Melanie DuPois, editor, Smoke and Mirrors: The Politics and Culture of Air Pollution, New York, N.Y.; London: New York University Press, →ISBN, section “The Emergence of Air Pollution as a Problem”, pages 174–175:
text: Over the next few weeks we had the rest of our children over to reveal something of our intentions, although I’m quite sure a number of unintentions were exposed as well.
ref: 2009, Steve Rasnic Tem, “When We Moved On”, in Mike Allen, editor, Clockwork Phoenix 2: More Tales of Beauty and Strangeness, Winnetka, Calif.: Norilana Books, →ISBN, page 275:
text: The now sizable and prospering domain of nanoscale research (NSR) may be regarded as an unintended consequence of two research projects. Each project yielded unintended results, and NSR is the child of the fusion of these twin unintentions.
ref: 2014, Anne Marcovich, Terry Shinn, “Mainstays of Nanoscale Research”, in Toward a New Dimension: Exploring the Nanoscale, Oxford, Oxon: Oxford University Press, →ISBN, page 14:
text: In the museum, black patches punctuate white oiled surfaces, life smudging through the daunting unintentions to quiet us for good.
ref: 2016, Richard Lyons, “Montreal Poem”, in Un Poco Loco: Poems, Oak Ridge, Tenn.: Iris Press, →ISBN, page 68:
glosses: Something that is unintentional.