Discombobulated 囧

Anecdotal blog-discombobulated

Now I like watching TV – I admit it! I like comedy, drama, and especially crime drama, I’m a complete addict!

I was watching a light drama the other day and they said something like ‘I was completely discombobulated’, and I thought ‘What a great word!’ It’s become more fashionable recently, so it’s being used more often and more people know what it means. I’d never heard it until a year or so ago, and now I’m hearing it more and more often.

I googled it and it means confused and embarrassed – like if you had to give a speech and suddenly forgot what you wanted to say. You can see a picture of a guy called ‘Emotion Eric’ looking discombobulated on his website (www.emotioneric.com scroll down the list of emotions on the left side of the site to find discombobulated). I think it goes well (collocates) with ‘completely’, ‘really’ and ‘totally’, and it’s pretty informal, I think because it sounds so funny it doesn’t really work as a formal word.

When was the last time you were discombobulated?!

（英国使馆文化教育处供稿）