Misoccupy

It may well be supposed that these grave religious writers would look on it as a profanation to waste valuable ink and parchment, and misoccupy their own precious time, in perpetuating the useless, heathenish, and often lewd fictions, which they would gladly see banished from the memory of the human race.

Let them not be idle, or misoccupied.

It is not to be misused, like other books full of mad doctrine and chatter which misoccupy your mind with their beggarly pedantry, so grasp this volume of books of finely invented truth and with your eyes open, like dogs hunting for fleas;

Their 'brutal persecutions', he told his friend and patron the Earl of Buchan, were 'unceasingly contrived to distract & misoccupy my attention':

Desert you the misoccupied chair of justice arbitrator, the position that should be occupied by honor and contaminate not the air of heaven with the name of liberty, freedom and justice befouled by your construction.

He deplored the fact that Chambers rather than someone like Thomas Sandby had been commissioned to build Somerset House, and he also audaciously argued that architects like Chambers had been more interested in filling their pockets than in promoting the grand style by causing the interior of buildings to be "frittered and broken by stucco ornaments of griffins, cobwebs, honey-suckles, pannels, and such like insipid, not to say disgusting trash, as misoccupy all the space around us, which ought to have been wisely and happily reserved for those highly cultivated efforts of Painting and Sculpture, so worthy the national reputation.

To misoccupy the spaces of shop and church is as self-destructive as avoiding them.