The epic brouhaha on New Year’s Eve was ended by a defenestration. This left my love discombobulated.
More than 10,000 users of Dictionary.com have voted for the word that best describes 2010. The five leading nominations were: discombobulate, defenestration, brouhaha, love and epic. ‘Epic’ won the poll, by just 40 votes.
All of those words are deeply emotive, reflecting, I suppose, a year of political and economic cataclysm. Epic’s strictly poetic overtones have receded before over-use and misuse, as in ‘epic fail’ – a wonderfully pointed piece of slang. Discombobulate is one of those cherished rarities: an elegant Americanism. It derived from discompose and discomfort during the English Regency period to describe the combined emotions of frustration and confusion – very apt in the current circumstances. Defenestration used to be a form of political activism, especially in medieval Prague, but has since developed a figurative sense, able to describe the radicalism of the times; a task equally suited to the sensational clamour associated with the word brouhaha.
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