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aspiration, like getting unwanted air out through fluttering lips, impelled by colossal ennui, with a rolling of the eyes, and a slight tossing of the head.” Thus, to baffle is more than confuse but less than vilify ; it is to turn somebody upside down with contempt, disgrace them ten ways from Sunday, with your reproach. Biologist Edward O. Wilson writes, “Sometimes a concept is baffling not because it is profound but because it’s wrong.” Companion words or senses include the baffle in a sound studio or mechanical device, whose first published use was in 1881.

BAKSHEESH
    A tip; a favor, gratuity, charity; a reward. A benevolent bribe offered to smooth out service in the bazaar or market; a subtle gift to grease the wheels of a business deal; alms for the poor to fulfill a religious obligation. As an integral social custom in Islamic cultures, baksheesh is a familiar, almost incantatory word, heard on the streets from Cairo, Damascus, and Jerusalem to Baghdad, Beirut, and Calcutta. It is an echo of the American cry of “Brother, can you spare a dime?” but carries the spiritual overtones
of the medieval practice of giving alms, whereby spiritual merit is earned. Its roots are in the Persian bakhshish , a gift, which stems from the verb bakhshidan , to give or forgive. The first written appearance in English dates back to 1625. A passage in the classic travelers’ tale The Great Railway Bazaar , by Paul Theroux, illuminates the custom as practiced in Iran in the 1970s: “It is an old country; everywhere in the gleaming modernity are reminders of the orthodox past—the praying steward, the portraits, the encampments of nomads, and on what is otherwise one of the best run railways in the world, the yearning for the baksheesh .”

BAMBOOZLE
    To fool, guile, trick, or hoodwink . Those long o ’s and that hard z lends the word a “grifterly” feeling, to coin a phrase, evocative of an Elmore Leonard detective novel riddled with deceitful women and swindling men. Bamboozle is first recorded in 1703, a slang or cant word, derided by Johnson as “not used in pure or grave writings.” However, Brewer traces it back to the Chinese and Gypsy bamboozle , meaning to “dress a man in bamboos to teach him swimming,” which gives rise to an image of a kind of human raft. Even though it’s nearly impossible to rhyme in a poem— bamboozle and ouzel? —it is still a raffish word that lifts a smile on the face of anybody who uses it. The Scots can take credit, tracing it back to bombaze , to perplex, though it may also be connected to the French bombast .
If you can feel a wild animal writhing around in the word when you say it out loud, you’re not far wrong. There was a popular epithet in Old French, “To make a baboon out of somebody,” an uncanny reference to embabuiner , to make a fool out of. Not all have been charmed by the word. Jonathan Swift included it in his dubious index expurgatorius , his list of words to be expunged from the language. Nonetheless, it could not be repressed, and Benjamin Disraeli used it deftly in a letter: “It is well known what a middle man is: he is a man who bamboozles one party and plunders the other.” Carl Sagan warned, “One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. The bamboozle has captured us. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” Finally, if you just happen to be using bamboozle in a poem or song lyrics and you’re stuck for a rhyme, you might try gongoozle , a rare but useful word meaning “to stare at, idly watch,” as those whose leisure activity centers around watching boats drift by in the canals of England.

BANDERSNATCH
    A monster so horrible, so terrifying, nobody has ever stayed around long enough to get a description of it . Beware, for it is outside your door, licking its chops. If you look up the hideous verb transmogrify , you’ll