Comfortable is used in the interrogative form: are you comfortable? The question never denotes an intimate relationship between those who ask and those who answer (in love, comfort does not help). Are you comfortable with the rules of the company, for example, or with something that I said that you might disapprove of? We ask in the affirmative about what we imagine might upset or offend. Are you comfortable with the place you are expected to occupy, instead of are you comfortable with the place you are not expected to leave? This bond is not horizontal, it is skewed. Those who ask are in the position to provide comfort or discomfort, a remnant of the power held by the feudal lord over the life and death of his serfs. Letting them live granted him automatic magnanimity.