Reporter Jan Freeman writes about the difference between “amused” and “bemused” in The Boston Globe:

Merrill Perlman, who writes the Language Corner column for the Columbia Journalism Review, posted an entry on bemused several weeks ago, objecting to the sentence “Obama shrugged off McCain’s attacks with a bemused smile.”

“If the last six months of Nexis citations are any guide,” she wrote, “more than half the people reading this think, as the above writers did, that ‘bemused’ means something like ‘amused.’ But it doesn’t.” Perlman, formerly director of copy desks at the Times, believes that “unless Obama was ‘confused,’ or ‘muddled,’ or ‘puzzled,’ he was not ‘bemused.'”