Dictionary

chameleonize en · VERB

Etymology

From chameleon + -ize.

Meanings

1. (intransitive) To change colour or turn various colours; to be transformed (to suit changing circumstances).
   • The new socialists seemed to be just tuning in, uttering empty words, doing as the others did, following them, not sticking out, “chameleonizing” to the environment and to a socialist way of life. 2012, Sanja Potkonjak, “The Indifferent, the Obedient, and the Adjusted: Three Women’s Narratives about Socialism in Croatia”, in Daniela Koleva, editor, Negotiating Normality: Everyday Lives in Socialist Institutions, Transaction Publishers, page 213:
   • I care nothing for the plaudits of the populace. I’m ambitious, in a way; but when that way requires me to leave the people—the things—that I love, then ambition chameleonizes and I become ambitious antithetically. 1909, Porter Emerson Browne, chapter 13, in A Fool There Was, New York: The H.K. Fly Company, page 100:
   • King by your leaue, for in your kingſhippe I muſt leaue you, and repeate how from white to redde you camelionized. 1599, [Thomas] Nashe, Nashes Lenten Stuffe, […], London: […] [Thomas Judson and Valentine Simmes] for N[icholas] L[ing] and C[uthbert] B[urby] […], →OCLC, page 51:
   • One of the things I love about my bar is its ability to chameleonize from a rock-and-roll dive bar to a wine geek tasting post to an annoyingly elitist art world clubhouse to a fashion model/coke whore hang to a gay bar to a bridge-and-tunnel frat party, sometimes incorporating three such incarnations in a night. 2003, Toby Cecchini, Cosmopolitan: A Bartender’s Life, Broadway Books:
2. (transitive) To cause to change colour or turn various colours; to transform (to suit changing circumstances).
   • 1897, Edward Franklin Buchner, A Study of Kant’s Psychology with Reference to The Critical Philosophy, Psychological Review, New York: Macmillan, Monograph Supplement, No. 4, January, 1897, Chapter 2, p. 14, The dogmatism of youth was perfected in the criticism of manhood, and revealed in the ethical exotericism of old age. Yet, with all the multifarious content of his thinking, and the chameleonized forms it was led to assume, there runs through it all a common trait.
   • 1878, “Homœopathy and Exclusiveness,” Letter to the editor, Medical Record, 28 September, 1878, p. 257, Such a difference of opinion is passed over with a shrug of the shoulder, for some “regulars” practise empirically (clinically), and others scientifically. The “majority” and “Medical Ethics” contend that every practitioner shall sail under the colors he or she may select, but not use one which may be chameleonized to suit the individual notions and prejudices of the public at large.
3. (reflexive) To transform oneself, as if changing colour like a chameleon.
   • 1941, Radio Showmanship, Minneapolis, MN: Showmanship Publications, February, 1941, p. 67, Morn Patrol originator Al Bland authors all the comedy patter, chameleonizes himself into a blackface character, “Mose.”
   • 1864, George Bliss, “Causes of the War,” Speech delivered in the House of Representatives, Washington, DC: Constitutional Union Office, pp. 3-4, If an intelligent stranger desired to discover the root of our national difficulties, he would naturally inquire into the history, character, and action of the political parties into which our people have been divided. […] he would learn the history of a party of perpetual opposition, constantly vilifying the administration of Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Jackson, and of the later Democratic Presidents, chameleonizing itself as often as its inflexible purpose of opposition required.
   • 1841, Fanny Appleton Longfellow, Letter to Isaac Appleton Jewett dated 25 January, 1841, in Edward Wagenknecht (ed.), Mrs. Longfellow: Selected Letters and Journals of Fanny Appleton Longfellow, New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1956, p. 75, […] after [reading] Virgil and Dante […] in an atmosphere trembling with eternal lamentations and on a soil drenched with unceasing showers of tears all the morning, every evening, lately, I am in a ball-room where flourishes a whip-syllabub of life, as if under our feet yawned no such realities. But I can chameleonize myself and enjoy all.
   • […] let me explain some of the ways I decided to chameleonize myself in order to slip through the watchful gaze of those who might prey on me for being a solo female traveler overseas. 2014, Bernadette A. Kutcher, “The Final Educational Degree: Life”, in Dale L. June, editor, What they Didn’t Teach at the Academy: Topics, Stories, and Reality beyond the Classroom, Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, page 16:
   • 2002, Jeremy Van Blommestein, A Racial Journey with Lived Identities: The Cumulative Experience of Individuals which Black-White Parentige in a White-Dominated Society, PhD Dissertation, University of Florida, Chapter 3, p. 66, A logical question to ask is, why she is strying to convince society that she is white and at the same time also half-and-half. Perhaps this is the prerogative of individuals who are mixed because at times they have the ability to chameleonize themselves.

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