Word of the Day: obfuscation
This word has appeared in 36 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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An illustration of a teacher saying the word "obfuscation."
Credit...Cindy Lozito
By The Learning Network
Jan. 11, 2024
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obfuscation \ ˌɑbfəˈskeɪʃən \ noun
1. darkening or obscuring the sight of something
2. meddling with people’s understanding in order to confuse, baffle or bewilder them
3. confusion resulting from failure to understand
Listen to the pronunciation.
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The word obfuscation has appeared in 36 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year, including on Nov. 25 in “Everybody Knows Flo From Progressive. Who Is Stephanie Courtney?” by Caity Weaver:
You know how sometimes, in a commercial, there is a scene that takes place in a house? How many houses do you suppose the commercial auteurs need to borrow to pull that off? “Zero — that’s what movie magic is for”? Perhaps, “One”? In fact, on a gray morning this past spring, the people who make the Progressive commercials commandeered a whole block of houses, to shoot scenes inside one family’s appealingly nondescript home. “There are specific neighborhoods in L.A. that don’t look like L.A.,” Sean McBride told me. “If you start paying attention,” he said, you will notice the same homes reused “constantly.”
… If cars are present, their manufacturer logos are covered with abstract shapes of similar dimensions, their license plates, upon inspection, cursively reading not “California” but “Drive Safely.” This obfuscation process is called “Greeking,” as in, “It’s all Greek to me” (as in, “I can’t tell what that says, but it definitely doesn’t say Kia Optima, for legal reasons”).
Daily Word Challenge
Can you correctly use the word obfuscation in a sentence?
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