Obstrufication

The word for the day...Obstrufication

I've been using this word for about 40 years now. Not only is it useful, I can't come up with an adequate synonym (Cinnamon, if you ask my partner) which succinctly expresses the identical concept. Obstrufication means to make unnecessarily dense or complex, presumably to prevent others from comprehending it. I wanted to double check my spelling of it (which is really all about the "u") and discovered that while it generates 788 hits on google, it doesn't appear in any dictionary. Not even the Oxford Unabridged, the mother-lode of words.

We all (and by we I mean me and 788 others) all agree on the meaning of obstrufication. I learned this word in college, and now, decades later discover that it does not exist. What makes a word a word? Obfuscation, it turns out, is the word we've all been really meaning to use. (And by we I mean me and 788 others)

Just to make the time lost looking in online dictionaries and envisioning making my own Wikipedia page for those confused by obstrufication, allow me to share something useful I did find. Here's the top defining words of the 00's, which I refer to as the oh-ohs. http://www.merriam-webster.com/top-ten-lists/defining-a-decade/rogue.html

I think we've all learned something here today. Just cuz you learn it in college, pay off all those student loans, lead a productive life and use the word often doesn't make it real. You generally don't know what you don't know.

Now that's unnecessarily dense.