misappearance

mis- +‎ appearance or misappear +‎ -ance

misappearance (plural misappearances)

1. A false appearance; An instance of seeming as other than what is the true form; an illusion.
   • 1883, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: First-second Series, page 39:

     Certain priests, whom he describes as conversing very learnedly together, appeared to the children, who were at some distance, like dead horses; and many the like misappearances.

   • 1977, John Jesse, Hidden Causes of Injury, Prevention and Correction, for Running Athletes and Joggers, page 119:

     In the standing position, wth the fixation of the leg and foot on the ground, the adduction or abduction of the leg on the pelvis is a misappearance. In reality, there is in this position an actual adduction or abduction of the pelvis on the legs, created by the pelvis tilting laterally on the legs.

   • 2002, Anthony Kubiak, Agitated States: Performance in the American Theater of Cruelty, →ISBN:

     Keeping both American theater and its double within the sight lines, I would like to look at MPD as a pathology in which both both performativity and social performance are outstripped by a mise-en-scène that veers past the merely performative and dangerously close to theater itself, threatening to erase the differences in its very misappearance.

2. Something that appears in a way that it should not.
   • 1903, Annual Report of the Board of Prison Commissioners of Massachusetts:

     We know of no set of men who are more quick to detect any misappearance than the force having charge of the condition of the yard.