Kerfuffle

 WORD OF THE DAY

kerfuffle / noun / ker-FUFF-ul

Definition
: a disturbance or commotion typically caused by a dispute or conflict

Examples
“I wasn’t the only one given a seat that had already been claimed. ... Thankfully the flight was half-empty. Once the seating kerfuffle subsided, I noticed something remarkable. I had an incredible amount of legroom ...”
— Christopher Muther, The Boston Globe, 8 June 2022

Recently, there has also been a separate kerfuffle about lengthy headnotes—the introductions that precede most recipes on a blog or in a cookbook—as some people just want to skip the story and get cooking.
— Wired, 1 Aug. 2022

Did You Know?
Fuffle is an old Scottish verb that means “to muss” or “to throw into disarray”—in other words, to (literally) ruffle someone’s (figurative) feathers.
The addition of car-, possibly from a Scottish Gaelic word meaning “wrong” or “awkward,” didn’t change its meaning much. In the 19th century carfuffle, with its variant curfuffle, became a noun, which in the 20th century was embraced by a broader population of English speakers and standardized to kerfuffle, referring to a more figurative feather-ruffling.
There is some kerfuffle among language historians over how the altered spelling came to be favored. One theory holds that it might have been influenced by onomatopoeic words like kerplunk that imitate the sound of a falling object hitting a surface.