Discombobulated

Image by Dex Ezekiel, via Unsplash

I carried my cuppa into the dining room. Huh? Didn’t I just bring my laptop down and put it on the table? Apparently not. I headed back upstairs to my spare room cum office. No laptop. What?! Up another flight of stairs to the bedroom for one of those ‘just in case’ looks. Not there either. I felt discombobulated. A personal computer isn’t a set of keys. How can I lose it? I ran down 2 flights of stairs and entered the dining room from the hallway. Oh.

The PC is on the chair by the window where I left it, while I was wiping breakfast crumbs from the table. Mystery solved.

I often feel discombobulated, sometimes by my own folly but more often by ‘life.’ I enjoy using the word discombobulated as it has an onomatopoeic ring – as if something has been taken apart and reassembled with the pieces not quite in the right order. It’s also rather fun to say, each of its 6 syllables being pronounced exactly as written.  

According to ‘Etymonline’, the word is first recorded in 1834 as discombobricate, meaning to upset or embarrass. It emerged from a craze of coining fanciful mock-Latin words, alongside confusticate (confuse), absquatulate (run away), spifflicate (confound or beat), scrumplicate (eat). What a delicious set of words! Viva the fanciful coining of mock-Latin words!

If you can converbulate a mock-Latin word or 2 – please share below.

Have I confusticated you? I’ll absquatulate now and scrumplicate my breakfast. See you next month for some more spifflication!