Muleociation

[John McChesney-Young]

A high school teacher in Bryn Athyn, PA, posted to the Latinteach
list the following:

... one student 3 times used a word [in an assignment]
  I have never
seen, nor have my colleagues on the faculty who have
seen it.  He obviously thinks it has a meaning, so I
thought I would run it past all of you in case someone
recognizes it as either a word or a misspelling or can
anyone figure out where in Hades he got it.

Muleociation.  As in, "Venyus was originally
muleociated with vegetable gardens,"  or "Hera was
particularly muleociated with the institution of
marriage."   "Mercury's purse was symbolic of his
muleociation with commerce."  Obviously the word
association works here, but that persistently was not
the word he chose.

I am at a loss, because I can find no muleociation
between this word and any Latin or Greek roots.
Perhaps this just sprung full-grown from my student's
head.

(end quote)

Searches for assorted forms of the word ("muleociate," "muleociated,"
etc.) at the search engine Dogpile turn up just a handful of uses in
three places: a discussion forum for players of the Xbox game system,
and a couple of others for developers of the open source version of
Netscape's browser, Mozilla.

Here are two examples where it apparently means "association":

http://forum.teamxbox.com/showthread.php?s=fe88131c6c8d084291e2bef1061dad71&threadid=201892&highlight=muleociation

Also on Ubi-Soft's on site the Xbox logo is nowhere to be found in
muleociation with Far Cry.

[and]

http://www.mozdev.org/mailarchives/reviewers/2002-December/000890.html

\"The first thing you have to do to build a custom view is
instantiate your tree and then muleociate a view object with it,
commonly known as a view.

(end quote)

Teoma also reports a use at the Teambox.com domain in this phrase,
"Proud member of the Correct Grammar muleociation," but it appears to
be a signature file which is no longer in use.

Here's a place where the sense is clearly different:

http://www.pseudorandom.org/irclog/mozilla/%23mozilla/%23mozilla.2002-12/%23mozilla.2002-12-23.log

09:29 < biesi> bsmedberg: german reden="to talk" mond="moon" so there
09:30 < Neil> heh, someone posting in n.p.m.reviewers using
censorware - associate gets turned into muleociate :-)
09:30 < bsmedberg> biesi: I figured it was translation... makes more sense now

(end quote)

Cf. "mucilage"?

A check of Usenet via Google's Groups search turned up no hits at all.

Has anyone here run across the term before, and does anyone have an
idea of its origin, if it's common in any particular areas, and
whether it (usually) bears any distinction in meaning from
"association"?

Thanks!

John
--


*** John McChesney-Young  **  panis at pacbell.net  **   Berkeley,
California, U.S.A.  ***