I was reading an article today that used the word “obfuscate”. This is not a word I hear in normal conversation, so I am not that familiar with it. I had to look it up:
- to confuse or perplex; bewilder
- to darken or obscure
My first reaction was to consider the irony: to be confused by a word that literally means “to confuse.” I even had to carefully word that last sentence to avoid implying that the intention of the word was to confuse: “a word that means to confuse.”
My second reaction was that those who wish to convey a message to the general public will achieve better results when using terms and examples that the general public is familiar with, as opposed to requiring the distraction of researching obscure references.
My third reaction was to consider the general decline in English language skills permeating this country. When I went to college, I studied engineering. At the time, it was a given that engineering students were not the best English students – the engineering college even had it’s own English department. Our priority and focus was expected to be in the area of applied sciences.
But when I graduated and entered the workforce, the business and technical documentation I ran across was so badly written that I felt like an English major. I began an endless and hopeless battle against garbled, incomplete, contradictory, ambiguous, and confusing documents.
But my encounters with semi-literacy did not stop with the corporate world. Newspaper articles fall prey to the same mistakes. I saw sentences so badly worded that they actually said the opposite of what was intended. Sometimes it was only a lack of punctuation, sometimes it was just bad grammar. Even in the age of ubiquitous (omnipresent, all over the place) spell-checkers, typos persist. When you spell the wrong word correctly, a spell-checker is no substitute for a proofreader. The shortening of article titles frequently leads to incoherency and, all too often, contradiction with the actual content of the article.
It seems like the more we try to reach a broader audience, the harder it gets to express complex ideas.
I don’t even want to think about the long-term consequences of texting in abbreviated words.
Related articles
- What is obfuscation of source code (wiki.answers.com)
- Word of the Day | obfuscate (learning.blogs.nytimes.com)
- Too Busy to Notice (trailreflections.wordpress.com)
- Delay Deny Obfuscate (decisionstats.com)
Diary of a Mad Voter 