No one likes being discombobulated. How did the feeling get such a fun name?

No one likes being discombobulated. How did the feeling get such a fun name? April 15, 20265:00 AM ET By  Rachel Treisman The potentially discombobulating swirl of New York City's Times Square Leo Patrizi/Getty Images hide caption toggle caption Leo Patrizi/Getty Images Feeling a little confused, concerned, off-kilter, out of sorts? Sounds like you're discombobulated. It's a fitting word for an unsettling feeling. It sounds formal, maybe even fancy. But it's actually the creation of some good old-fashioned American jokesters. "The word is very much an American invention," says Joshua Blackburn, the U.K.-based author of The Language-Lover's Lexipedia. "And it seems to have been part of a fad in the 19th century for inventing rather fancy, grand and rather humorous-sounding words." Sponsor Message NPR History Dept. Do We Talk Funny? 51 American Colloquialisms He says the first part of the word, "discom," was likely inspired by real words like discompose and discomfort. The final part, "ulate," also reads like many other Latin-derived verbs (think tabulate, regulate, populate). The wild card is the middle part, that funny-sounding "bob." Blackburn, citing linguist Ben Zimmer's work, thinks "bob" comes from "bobbery," an Anglo-Indian word for commotion or noise. Taken all together, Blackburn says, it works. "The sound of the word seems to suggest the meaning of the word," he says. "The sound of the word is discombobulating." Oxford English Dictionary traces the verb's first known use to a newspaper in Hagerstown, Md., in the 1820s. Blackburn says it evolved over the years, from "discombobborate" in 1825 to "discombobrocate" in 1834 and, finally, "discombobulation" in 1839. This was during an era in which Americans apparently got a kick out of concocting elaborate pseudo-Latin words — what's sometimes called "Dog Latin" — as a means of mocking politicians and elites. Writers and other creative types would take parts of Latin-sounding words and "form them into silly-...