how do you use a closure in a class

[Paul McGuire]

Well, despite my parenthetical disclaimer, my attempted point was that
the OP wanted to avoid replicating several functions that were mostly
the same.  I think Python's idiom of using a function to create and
return callables is a comparable feature to using anonymous closures.
Unfortunately, I guess the verbosity of the tallyFn calls was too much
of a distraction.  The cut-and-paste alternative (which the OP was
trying to avoid) would be:

def tallyConsonant():
....tally["consonant] += 1

def tallyVowel():
....tally["vowel"] += 1

def tallyNotSure():
....tally["notsure"] += 1

def tallyOther():
....tally["other"] += 1

I was hoping to offer an example of the Pythonic
function-returns-a-callable idiom, instead of having this discussion
spiral down into another "what we really need are brace-enclosed
anonymous enclosures" futility.

-- Paul