Baffle

A Channel Baffle Chute

BA•FFLER. n.s.

       [from baffle.]

He that puts to confusion, or defeats.

Experience, that great baffler of speculation, assures us the thing is too possible, and brings, in all ages, matter of fact to confute our suppositions.
        Government of the Tongue.

Helen Keller Reading Raised Print, photograph’d by Marshall (1902)

Reading and talking to myself.

See Anne Mansfield Sullivan (ca.1867-1936): “Miss Keller does not as a rule read very fast, but she reads deliberately, not so much because she feels the words less quickly than we see them, as because it is one of her habits of mind to do things thoroughly and well. When a passage interests her, or she needs to remember it for some future use, she flutters it off swiftly on the fingers of her right hand. Sometimes this finger-play is unconscious. Miss Keller talks to herself absent-mindedly in the manual alphabet. When she is walking up or down the hall or along the veranda, her hands go flying along beside her like a confusion of birds’ wings.”

Franco Siron, “D’Aprés Picasso” (1947)

Thinking for no ascertainable reason of a band call’d “Your Mother” I used to listen to in some sweaty cave in the industrial wasteland of Ithaca, New York, down along Route 13. First heard a version of “Nobody Ever Call’d Pablo Picasso an Asshole” out of that band.