The word 'disconcert' is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it to describe the feeling of being confused or embarrassed because something has happened unexpectedly. For example, "The sudden interruption disconcerted the presenter, leaving her temporarily at a loss for words."
But the news that GE's leadership was willing to bend the rules over relatively tiny sums may well disconcert investors and analysts.The ruling was widely taken as a sign that the SEC would be more aggressive under its new head, Mary Schapiro.
On one memorable occasion, a gigantic inflated condom came floating down from the gallery to disconcert a notoriously adulterous politician who was trying to give a talk on privatisation.In 1980, when your diarist arrived there as an undergraduate, it was gripped by the issue of Soviet beastliness at home and abroad.
It is much harder for him to maintain that counter-narrative of peaceful democratic change, which was supposed to disconcert Iran and al-Qaeda, while American missiles rain on Libya.Meanwhile, the big regional problems that confronted America before the Arab awakening have not gone away.
The memorial to the Korean war will disconcert American visitors, but it is useful for understanding the war from a Chinese point of view.Not all the entries are so politically didactic.
But scrabbling around in a miniature maze can disconcert only a little when the polished wood floors of the gallery are but a few steps away.
A RECENT article in the New York Times explored a trend guaranteed to disconcert freelancers and professional loiterers: the practice of banning laptops in coffee shops (something our colleagues at Babbage have considered as well).
Only this jokiness, intended to disconcert, makes it – as it was intended – almost impossible to know just how seriously to take them or their compositions, how far to puzzle away for meanings in works that are meant to portray meaninglessness.
His emotionally driven unorthodoxy may disconcert the RFU's corporate time-servers, but it is suited to a rebooted England team that will be obliged to reassert itself in next spring's Six Nations Championships.
He played as though his limbs were simply tools at his disposal, so the frailty does not disconcert him.
The suggestion has been that he was inspired by the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham, known as ISIS or ISIL, which has expressed particular anger at Australia, for reasons that are complex but encompass the government's involvement in military operations against the group and, perhaps more than that, a simple wish to disconcert.
So it appears in the Palace of Justice that it is only the Americans and the British who can hold up a mirror to Germany and help her to solve her own perplexing mystery — that mystery which, in Nuremberg and the countryside around it, is set out in flowers, flowers which disconcert by being not only lovely but beloved.
