In reply to:
>> Scombussolato which sounds so similar, and has also the same meaning...
>> Scombussolato means - for example - someone which lost ( the way shown from ) the compass, since
>> compass = bussola.
>> ...Incidentally, I am always wondering if it is not confusing to use the same word compass in English
>> in 2 ways
> Discombobulated entered english about the time of WWI-(according to M-W 10th) and it might well
> have been taken almost right from the italian..
The similarity of these two words is, in my analysis, a felicitous coincidence. As Emanuela rightly points out, the seventeenth-century Italian scombussolare is (at least mostly) rooted in bussola, which means a direction-finding compass and is cognate with English "box" (as compasses were once made of wood).
In the early Renaissance Mediterranean, celestial navigation relied on the juxtaposition of the two sorts of compasses (the magnetic needle floating in a box of liquid and the pivoted instrument also known as a pair of dividers) and metonomy allowed for the trasfer of the name for the former object to the latter, in English. Maritime terminology was a great source of loan words from even before the Crusades until the industrial revolution in this region. A sailor who had lost his compass (in either sense) would certainly have been at sea.
My theory is that the metaphorical image underlying "discombobulation" is entirely different. I suspect this word may ultimately hark back to the idea of thread (or wire) coming off a bobbin (cf. haywire). There does not seem to me to be any evidence of borrowing from Italian. BTW, Merriam-Webster missed their mark in dating discombobulate and its variants such as discombobberate (cited OED 1838). These words are fanciful, early-nineteenth-century, American coinages on a par with other Latinate slang the likes of absquatulate and...
...someone give me another example, please.
chow,
- ph
