I saw a bee today. A BEE!?!? In January? WTF, Gus?
Okay, so another one of those just about to fall asleep and the mind begins to flounder a bit in its own juices. I was considering the word discombobulate. I figured the root of the word must be combobulate. Add in to this, my spellchecker understands discombobulate, but not combobulate.
So here is what I was able to find out.
Combobulate seems to be a contraction of the Latin combo "to drink up or suck in" and the word late"broadly, widely, extensively". So therefore we can define combobulate as "to suck widely". This would make clear our fascination with things being discombobulated, or literally "to the opposite of suck widely", or to not suck. (From Latin dis-, apart, asunder.)
Then I began to put different prefixes on the word to give it a little wider range of usage. Consider
exocombobulate: to suck widely outside
endocombobulate: to suck in widely
antecombobulate: before sucking widely
autocombobulate: to broadly suck automatically
bicombobulate: to suck two things extensively
circumcombobulate: to suck widely around something
contracombobulate: to blow
miscombobulate: to sucky very badly
semicombobulate: to half suck widely
telecombobulate: to suck widely over a distance
ultracombobulate: to extremely suck extensively
unicombobulate: to suck broadly one single item
It is unfortunate that all this research may be for not as I do not see the majority of these words ever being used in conversation.
Oh well, let your minds run amuck.
Amuck, amuck, amuck, amuck, amuck, amuck, thack
Till next time,
Be mindful and awake
naught* Or nought if you prefer. :P Sorry, my OCD seems to stretch to typos now.
ReplyDeleteYou're having a lot of strange word moments this winter. Are you getting stir crazy? lol I know I am... if I could just remember to do my freaking homework BEFORE a Tuesday evening I might make it out to be social.
Hm, I am going to stop this comment as I just now felt my brain shutting off, so I would end up making even less sense than normal...
I think that, given the meanings of the two portions of the word, combobulate could be more accurately defined as "to draw together from a wide variety of sources", though that just kind of kills the commedic value =]
ReplyDeleteDiscombobulate, according to my Latin professor, comes from "dis" meaning against or not, "com" meaning with, and "bob" meaning head.
ReplyDeleteSo discombobulated would mean acting as if you had no head (or mind). This fits with the dictionary definition of being confused or throwing someone into a state of confusion. Very literally it would mean "having no head", and I have seen it used in that context in writings on the French revolution, "the guillotine discombobulated its victim cleanly, efficiently, and without remorse".