For instance, I was interested by the definition of "confabulate" to mean "to talk together".
That is still the first meaning in my dictionary, but I have only heard it used in Psychiatry to
mean to fill in gaps in the memory with detailed accounts of fictitious events believed true by
the narrator.
I remember a patient at McLean Hospital, an alcoholic with brain damage. In a bull session in
the day room, he told about having been a newspaper correspondent in Pacific in WWI. He was
much too young for this to have been possible. He was aboard a British warship that had been
sent to try to ensure that the queen of a couple islands did not allow German submarines to
obtain drinking water and other supplies in her territory, if she could prevent it. To flatter her,
in hope of persuading her to comply, the captain ordered that she be given elaborate ceremonial
welcome aboard the ship. So as her canoe was approaching he ordered "Battle Stations". This
called for all hands to line up along the deck, and urinate over the side which was an antique
procedure, originally intended to minimize danger during an engagement of an enemy shell ripping
up wooden decking, and possibly causing large splinter to penetrate a sailor's distended bladder
and lead to fatal peritonitis. Before the hands could secure from this drill, the queen was aboard,
and insisted on having oral sex with every man. And from there it got wilder and wilder, ending
with her breaking both of the Captain's legs by insisting on some bizarre native mode of copulation.
All this was told in a way that might have been believable outside the ambience of a mental hospital.
Never once did he have an inappropriate facial expression. It was not my place to challenge him on any
of the details, and none of the patients did, though several were sufficiently intact to have been
well aware of the fabrications in his yarn.