Word: bafflement
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Even when cloaked in don't-quote-me anonymity, a member of Congress rarely admits that a major national problem totally baffles him. But on Capitol Hill these days, lawmakers are confessing bafflement in the face of the massive and growing farm-subsidy scandal. "I admit I don't know what should be done," says a don't-quote-me G.O.P. wheat-state Senator. Vermont's George Aiken, ranking Republican on the Senate Agriculture Committee and longtime farm policy specialist, shakes his head in confessed bewilderment. Louisiana's Allen Ellender, Agriculture Committee chairman, mutters...
Convicted of murder, they accepted their fate with an air of bafflement about the white man's justice. In their eyes could be read their failure to understand why they had been arrested. True, they had killed Basuas-but are not the Basuas enemies of the Panamoli? True, they had disguised themselves in crocodile skins-but why not? They ate part of their victims' bodies-but how else could they appropriate the victims' personal qualities...
...fastest-breeding peoples. Trinidadians shunned the simplest mechanical devices, which Wright sadly pronounced, in any case, "an upper-mental-class activity, no good at all for Indians, Indonesians or Japanese." He finally tried a really simple, standard tablet that foams in the vagina, should kill all spermatozoa. Same bafflement: women took the tablets home and went on conceiving...
Cosmic Counter. The degree of cosmic radiation in space is a bafflement that earth satellites have so far only deepened. Geiger counters aboard Explorers I and III were so swamped that they choked up. The new Explorer IV, equipped with more specialized counters, reports that radiation doubles for every 60 miles over a threshold 250 miles beyond earth...
...leaders of the abstract expressionist movement. Billed by its partisans as the first home-grown art movement to rate international recognition, "The New American Painting" is getting cheers from most younger painters, cries of outrage from many critics, nibbles from some collectors and a monumental amount of bafflement from the general public...