Bemusement Park

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Here’s the lede on one article about the final presidential candidates’ debate:

“Calmly swatting away John McCain’s aggression in their last debate the other night, Barack Obama repeatedly flashed his beautiful smile—that silky version of the Palin wink—confidently signaling voters that he was bemused but never threatened.”

Another article on the debate said, “At numerous points, Obama shrugged off McCain’s attacks with a bemused smile.”

If the last six months of Nexis citations are any guide, more than half the people reading this think, as the above writers did, that “bemused” means something like “amused.” But it doesn’t. Unless Obama was “confused,” or “muddled,” or “puzzled,” he was not “bemused.”

Of all the major dictionaries, only Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines “bemused” as “to cause to have feelings of wry or tolerant amusement,” and that definition is its third, meaning it is the least used or most recently recognized. All the other dictionaries and usage guides maintain that “bemuse” suggests a frown or furrowed brow, not a smile. A few dictionaries also define “bemused” as “to cause to be engrossed in thought.”

What has happened to “bemuse” has happened to a lot of other words: A perfectly good English word that means one thing is co-opted by people who think it means something else. Take “discrete,” for example, which is often misused to mean “discreet.” (“Discrete” means “separate” or “distinct.” Use it with discretion.) Usually, the incorrectly used word sounds like the word that is really wanted. It’s amusing, really, but it’s also “bemusing,” because a perfectly good word already existed. In some cases, a writer might use the wrong word in the belief that it is “more intellectual,” in which case the writer may “bemuse” readers who know better.

Here’s one ambiguous example, from an article on a federal appeals court hearing arguments in a tobacco settlement case: “‘So you want us to enforce the decree not based on what it says but what it “meant,”’ responded a bemused Judge David S. Tatel, a Clinton appointee who has sided with the government in tobacco cases.”

Was the judge puzzled? Or was he being sarcastic, and thus wryly amused?

But here’s one article, accompanying a recipe for empanadas, where “bemused” is unambiguously used correctly: “I’m a little bemused because the directions say the filling should be a bit spicy, but the recipe calls for just salt, black pepper and white pepper. I suppose the peppers give it a bit of kick.”

We were not “bemused.”

2 Comments

'Bemused smile' seemed perfectly descriptive to me--mildly puzzled.

I have been increasingly bemused (in the classical sense) by the growing use/misuse of this word in recent political coverage, which is why I searched it online and came upon this article.

It strikes me, though, that the problem with "bemused," and possibly a reason for its recent semantic drift, is that, just as the author notes that it is superfluous in its new usage as "amused" (there is already a perfectly good word), it also fills no clear lexical function in its original meaning. At least virtually none of the dictionary definitions I've found distinguishes it in any way from "confused." In fact, this may account for the relative infrequency with which the word is used, which would also contribute to the ease with which it is being appropriated to a new meaning. Given this status as a useless word, I suppose an argument could be made that redefining it as something like "gently amused by a state of confusion" (which often seems to be what recently authors mean to get at by misusing it), is actually semantically useful, even rescuing the word from oblivion. And that its recent appropriation to this meaning indicates a growing lexical need in this semantic "slot." In fact, it may have been drifting in this direction for some time, since the OED defines it as originally meaning "utterly confused," thus stronger than "confused," whereas most contemporary (correct) usage seems to use it to suggest mild or gentle confusion (see previous comment). All of this would be fine, except for the annoying ambiguities it generates for those of us who know the word's original meaning. But I guess that's the fate of those who know too much about words. Maybe we should just adopt a "bemused" posture while watching this fascinating bit of linguistic micro-evolution unfold -- that is, in the sense of gentle amusement at a state of confusion...

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This page contains a single entry by published on October 20, 2008 3:59 PM.

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