> Which of the following words means confused or perplexed?Considering cattywampus, whippersnapper, bumfuzzled and lollygag, the answer is: bumfuzzled. Photo credit: lexicographyfun2357.com[https://lexicographyfun2357.wordpress.com/2017/07/31/bumfuzzle/].It's a wordthat's not used very often, so we would understand if you're a bit bumfuzzledabout the word bumfuzzle. In fact, we'll preface with Merriam-Webster's"bumfuzzle" entry[https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bumfuzzle#:~:text=chiefly%20dialectal,%3A%20confuse%2C%20perplex%2C%20fluster] in case you think we're just making up words. And no, it's not new – bumfuzzleactually entered the American English lexicon around 1900. Primarily in thesouthern United States, bumfuzzle has been used to mean "to confuse," and likelycomes from some combination of “bamboozle,” “fuddle,” and “fuzzy.”The word is a bit oblique in recent history, but bumfuzzled has been spoken inthe public sphere as recently as 1999. At an awards ceremony, President BillClinton uttered the phrase:> "And–but you need to know–and when you go back home, people–I can imagine theAmerican people must be totally bumfuzzled; keep announcing surpluses and wekeep having budget fights. That’s what’s going on here."If a president can say it, anyone can. Let's bring bumfuzzled back into modernvernacular by learning about its uses here[https://slate.com/news-and-politics/1999/10/the-etymology-of-bumfuzzled.html].