Obfuscate

verb

To obscure, muddle, or conceal, especially with the intention of misleading
(Antiquated) To literally shade or cast darkness over

Usage

The usefulness of our decisions depends on knowing the facts, and yet as crucial as facts are to all of us, determining them is not always so simple. There will always be those who try to make a case by confounding our perception of reality. But the thing about the truth is that those who attempt to obfuscate it can only skirt it for so long.

Obfuscate means to cover, mask, or in some way obscure the true nature of an event, an idea, or reality itself. When one obfuscates something, the act of concealment can be as simple as omitting certain details while otherwise relaying one’s account accurately, or as brazen as outright lying about what happened - so long as the truth is in some way hidden, one has obfuscated it. Obfuscate often implies that this muddling of the actual nature of events is pursued as a means of deliberately creating confusion or uncertainty. While (actually) forgetting to tell your father that you drank the rest of the milk would certainly obfuscate the reasons for your family’s lack of milk, it would be more apt to refer to this omission as an act of obfuscation if you were trying to prevent him from finding out you were the milk-guzzling culprit.

Obfuscate also retains its literal, if somewhat dated, meaning of casting a shadow or darkness over something. Thus, though one would more commonly remark that the giant oak tree shades the patio in your backyard, you could just as appropriately say that the tree obfuscates it. What these two senses have in common is that when one obfuscates something, whether a material object with a shadow or a conceptual thing with misleading statements, it becomes harder to decipher.

Example: The terms and conditions of many social networks and online services are written to obfuscate what they are allowed to do to monetize your use.

Example: She couldn’t read her phone’s screen in the glaring sunlight, so she used her hand to obfuscate it to see what she was doing.

Origin

The word obfuscate, which first entered English in the mid-16^th century, was taken from the Late Latin word obfuscatus, which in turn came from obfuscare, meaning “to shade” or “to darken.” The latter term stems from the union of the prefix ob-, meaning “against,” and fuscare, meaning “to turn dark.” The verb fuscare draws upon the root fuscus, which means simply “dark.”

Derivative Words

Obfuscates: The simple present of obfuscate notes when he or she is the one covering or hiding something.

Example: The politician obfuscates her voting record by giving scripted, unrelated answers to questions about it.

Obfuscated: The past tense form indicates when the act of casting a shadow or obscuring the facts took place at an earlier point.

Example: He masterfully obfuscated any trace of the decorations for his girlfriend’s surprise birthday party.

Obfuscating: The present progressive iteration describes when one is in the current process of darkening or concealing.

Example: He kept obfuscating his failure to finish his report by referring his boss to his project teammates.

Example: The solar eclipse is obfuscating the Earth in an awe-inspiring astronomical phenomenon.

Obfuscation: Obfuscation is a noun for the act of casting shadow or muddling the facts.

Example: The overwrought, pretentious wording of her term paper was a poor obfuscation of the fact that she hadn’t researched her topic.

Obfuscatory: This adjective form of obfuscate characterizes something as routinely or inherently concealing something or deceiving the observer.

Example: The obfuscatory curtain did a poor job of hiding the hole in the plaster wall.

In Literature

From John Patrick Lowrie's Dancing with Eternity:

Polysyllables obfuscate a preponderant ignorance with so much more style and panache.

Lowrie wittily muses that the most elegant way one can mask, or obfuscate, an acute lack of understanding for some topic is by employing words with multiple syllables, in the hopes that one’s reader or listener will be too dazzled by impressive vocabulary to perceive any deficit of substance.

Comments

When used in context of computer science, Obfuscation usually means writing or presenting a software program in a way that its source code is difficult for (other) human beings to understand. Typically, the goal is to prevent others from readily using a piece of code. There are also tools available which help programmers to automatically obfuscate or “de-obfuscate” their code. Note that obfuscation is different from encryption in this context. While encryption requires a “secret” or a “key” to unlock the true form of something, reading the results of obfuscation typically just requires lot of effort and patience.

Mnemonic

To obfuscate, put something in a place that’s not obvious.
To obfuscate is to place obstacles in front of something.