‘Gimp play is a craft’: how a Canadian writer went from fetish sex work to creating powerful BBC drama
runs a headline on the Guardian website. And if it marks the birth of a way to a showbiz career that doesn't involve the Cambridge Footlights, then it's nothing but good news.
No, it's the first paragraph of the article below that worries me:
When the Canadian playwright Jordan Tannahill moved to London in 2016, it was the week after the EU referendum. “For my partner at the time, who was British, it was a devastating kind of discombobulation,” Tannahill says.
Because you can't have "a devastating kind of discombobulation".
"Discombobulation" comes from "discombobulate", a word invented in the 19th century for comic effect. Dictionary.com explains:
Discombobulate “to confuse, upset, or frustrate” was originally a jocular American coinage from the North Midland U.S. (from Ohio west through Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa, to Nebraska). Discombobulate is a pseudo-Latinism like absquatulate and confusticate, and based on learned Latin words like disaffiliate or disaggregate, or humorous alterations of discompose or discomfort.
The many variant spellings include discombobligate, discombobolate, discomboberate, discombooberate, and discumboblificate. Discombobulate entered English in 1825 in the spelling discomboberated.
And for me the word maintains its slightly enforced jocularity. It's redolent, if not of red noses and outsize shoes, then at least of an uncle who can waggle his ears and wants to organise the children to play party games.
It's fine in letters between friends - not that friends write each other letters any more - and, if you must, on social media.
Simon Williams is one of those invaluable chess players who talks about games as he plays them and then posts the whole thing on YouTube (see also John Bartholomew and Daniel Naroditsky). If he succeeds in disrupting his opponent's smooth development in a game, he may remark that "White's queenside is discombobulated", and the word works in this informal context. But I have doubts about the use of "discombobulation" in a serious newspaper
And "a devastating kind of discombobulation" doesn't work at all. It's yoking together two words in completely different registers. All I see is a clown blowing his nose and miming exaggerated weeping.
2 comments:
Totally agree about “a devastating kind of discombobulated” — absolutely doesn’t work and I think you’ve identified why.
But I like the word itself. Never knew its origins until now. Always gave me an image like something knitted becoming undone but entangled in itself in the process, but somehow also broken into distinct parts and randomly distributed across some space (in an entangled sort of way).
And we need a word for that! I do, at least. It happens to me regularly enough.
So forget disco bob. (Let him have the variants on it.)
Quite agree. I had never seen discombobulate used in a serious context and it's an intrinsically humorous word, the whole fun of which is that it sounds grand but is in fact silly. It certainly doesn't work to describe feelings about Brexit where gutted, distraught or scunnered are more appropriate. Maybe we need a 'Reclaim Discombobulation' campaign.
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