syn. confused, dazed, baffled, puzzled, mystified
From Gloria Naylor’s “The Meanings of a Word”:
He snatched his test from me and spit out that word. Had he called me a nymphomaniac or a necrophiliac, I couldn’t have been more puzzled. I didn’t know what a nigger was, but I knew that whatever it meant, it was something he shouldn’t have called me. This was verified when I raised my hand, and in a loud voice repeated what he had said and watched the teacher scold him for using a “bad” word. I was later to go home and ask the inevitable question that every black parent must face--“Mommy, what does nigger mean?”
And what exactly did it mean?
Gloria Naylor reflects on the first time she heard the word “nigger” and how in her perplexity she resorted to asking her mother its meaning. First, Naylor compares the word “nigger” to “nymphomaniac” and “necrophiliac” to demonstrate its foreignness. As a small child, she had never heard such a word, and as any new word does to a child, it confused her. The only thing that Naylor could determine was that it was a “ ‘bad’ word,” yet she still could not decipher its denotation. Naylor’s recourse is eventually questioning her mother, which is the action most perplexed children take. Naylor even refers to the inquiry as “the inevitable question,” which eliminates the possibility that she truly knows the answer. The use of the word “Mommy” also reflects Naylor’s innocence, and helps to illustrate a small baffled child asking his or her mother a simple question in the mind of adults.
Naylor, Gloria. “The Meanings of a Word.” The Bedford Reader. Ed. X. J.
Kennedy, Dorothy M. Kennedy, and Jane E. Aaron. 8th ed. Boston:
Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2002. 469.