1680s, "confuse as to direction or situation," also, figuratively, "perplex, puzzle, confuse," from be- "thoroughly" + archaic wilder "lead astray, lure into the wilds," which is probably a back-formation from wilderness. An earlier word with the same sense was bewhape (early 14c.) and there is a 17c. use of bewhatle.
On Friday afternoon, I took Sophie up to an outlook in Culver City just to get some fresh air, to walk the dusty paths and look out over the city. Everything to the west was shrouded in a marine layer of fog, and the hillside was brown and scrubby with very little growing, but the birds were plentiful as was their chirping and with the breeze and the cool air and the sun on our faces, we were content, Sophie and I. I pushed her wheelchair on a path that wasn’t accessible, struggling a bit with divot-like spots in the dirt, rocks and narrow passageways. At one point an elderly couple and what appeared to be their grandson came up behind us, and the man asked whether I needed help. I said, no, thank you and the woman said, oh, you’re pushing an angel and while the angel talk makes me cringe I mustered up a cheerful acknowledgement, introduced Sophie and bubbled over in my customary way all accomodation and interest and lonely babble. The path was narrow so we kept talking, and I learned that the boy was a student at a nearby college, that he was from Nebraska and that his grandparents were visiting from Florida. We kept talking, me keeping up the pleasantries playing my social self asking about majors and virtual learning and the pandamnic and weird times and then they all had that dismissive thing that these people do who haven’t been affected by anything anything at all or who might just have terrible ability to brush things off to overlook. I saw them in Georgia, in Arizona, in Orange County here and on the tee-vee in other places in #terribleAmerica. The willfully ignorant. The College Boy said, well it could have been worse and I wanted to say how much worse could it have been — one million people dead in this country alone, the most of any country, hundreds of millions suffering, old people dying alone, livelihoods destroyed? but I said nothing, brittle and dry. We must get back to normal, the woman said and the man looked blank by then to me leached out like the fog and I felt the stirrings of anger and judgement and disdain and bewilderment and I said something something a lamentation in my head and I pushed my angel away from them and down the path away from them away.
I’ve had these exchanges and remain speechless. It’s as if people can’t see any form of human well-being that isn’t reflected in GDP or the stock market. I keep asking—what exactly is the economy *for* then?
"Much worse" meaning it could have touched them.