One way to hold defuse: something is sitting there ready to go off, and you reach in and take out the one small part that would set it off. You do not break the thing or carry it away — you remove the trigger, quietly, and then it is just an object again. That is the whole word: the danger is taken out before anything happens.
defuse 可以想成「把會引爆的那一小塊拿掉」。東西還在原地，你沒有把它砸掉，也沒有搬走，只是伸手把引信抽出來——之後它就只是一個東西了。整個字的重點都在這裡：在爆開之前，先把危險那一段拿走。所以它總是用在事情還沒發生的時候，而且做法是小心的，不是用力的。
From the word’s history
Wiktionary gives defuse as de- + fuse: the prefix that means taking something away, joined to the fuse that starts an explosion.
來源資料把 defuse 拆成 de-（拿掉）加上 fuse（引信）。字面就是「把引信拿掉」，跟上面的畫面完全對得上，這也是它另一個用法借用的來源。
Wiktionary, "defuse" (etymology 1)
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