Since COVID, resilience has become a buzzword for our mental health.
We are encouraged to build it, strengthen it and draw upon it. Yet when life leaves us rattled, disconcerted and thrown off kilter, we need a better idea.
We need “recombobulation”. To understand it, we first need to know the story of its parent, discombobulation. Discombobulate means to confuse, to disconcert, or to throw off-kilter. If you are discombobulated you are disoriented, bewildered, or feeling out of sorts.
My late brother-in-law was fond of “discombobulate” and used it repeatedly in his memoirs. It always makes me smile, because it carries an appropriate echo of him. He was joyful, very well-read but sometimes too critical of ideas that disagreed with his.
Discombobulation is a word that ought to come with a users’ manual. It sounds learned and authoritative as though it belongs in psychology textbooks and erudite novels.
But it does not belong there at all.
Origin of discombobulated
The word first appeared in the United States in the early nineteenth century as part of a fashion for creating mock-learned words. Or, as defined by the Online Etymological Dictionary “facetious mock-Latin coinages”.
Americans of the period were particularly fond of playing with their language. People could no longer merely leave, they “absquatulated”. “Absquatulate” was quickly replaced by that delightful Americanism “skedaddle” meaning to run away or “betake oneself hastily to flight” coined during the American Civil War.
You no longer confounded someone you “spifflicated” them (1850). A pompous or bombastic person was now “toploftical” (1823). If you “undercumstumbled” something you understood it (1824) and to “scrumplicate” meant to eat (1890). And if a person was extravagantly confused, they may well have been discombobulated.
Origin of recombobulatied
But the story continues. Only recently, Milwaukee Airport in Wisconsin, designated several Recombobulation Areas for the use of travellers emerging from security processing. After having sometimes to unpack or remove their shoes, belts, laptops, watches, etcetera, passengers can stop, regather their possessions and have some time to reorganise themselves before heading back out into the real world.
After a long-haul flight, we are sleep deprived, grumpy, impatient, sometimes dishevelled, and recombobulation is the perfect word for what we need. And, I think in the same way, when our lives get us into a similar state, we could all use a little recombobulation.