Each week The Sun's John McIntyre presents a relatively obscure but evocative word with which you may not be familiar, another brick to add to the wall of your vocabulary. This week's word:
DISCOMFIT
A reader suggested that I might be interested in having a look at discomfit (pronounced dis-KUM-fit), which we generally use as a verb meaning "to embarrass," "to make uneasy," or "to disconcert."
That is an attenuated sense of the word, which came into English in the thirteenth century meaning "to defeat an opponent in battle," "to vanquish," "to rout," or "to overthrow." We hear it in Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1: "Thrice hath this Hotspur Mars in swathling cloathes … Discomfited great Dowglas."
As a noun, a discomfit was a defeat in battle, though these days we prefer the form discomfiture.
The bloody sense resides in the etymology: Anglo-Norman descounfit, from Middle French descomfire, "to destroy a person or thing physically."
The warlike connotations over time morphed into "to thwart," "to frustrate the plans of," "to foil." Thus we have in Henry Fielding's The Modern Husband (1732): "Call me not ungrateful for attempting to discomfit your Husband's Purpose."
And so on to today's meaning, which suggests nothing more physically violent than squirming.
Example: Margery Sabin's "The Suttee Romance" in Raritan, Fall 1991: "Verne keeps just enough of the sentimental suttee romance to please rather than discomfit a British audience."