The obscure and the obfuscatory

"The craftsman has to learn how to make things, but he learns in the process of making them. So men become builders by building, harp players by playing the harp," wrote Aristotle in 'The Nicomachean Ethics.' What he says of crafts in general is also true of the craft of writing. There is no short cut to honing our language skills, no escape, that is, from regular composition.

"Elements such as patience, study, punctuality, self-denial, training of mind and body, hours of application and seclusion to produce what the literary dilettante reads in seconds, enter into such a career," says Dickens, dwelling on the travails of authorship. For that matter, writing, even what Matthew Arnold calls journeyman writing, involves thinking, observation and persuasion. The prized goals of modern communicators are clarity, economy and directness, which are not to be won without a struggle.

As Vallins put it, "even in ordinary writing the dictionary and the Thesaurus can help us only up to a certain point. There is something beyond definition, and, for the creative writer, a realm in which he walks by the light of intuition and imagination." He gives the impression of having "drunk at the well of English undefiled" and been "invigorated by the draught".

To return now to more mundane matters, we left a modifier dangling at the start of a sentence last week. It ran thus, Hailing from an orthodox family, a funeral always implied a solemn affair to me - a tiresome ceremony where everybody had to be long of face, short of stay, quick to cry and slow to enumerate the vices of the deceased in question.

The relevant rule says a "participial phrase at the beginning of a sentence must refer to the grammatical subject." The writer should have said, instead, Hailing from an orthodox family, I always found a funeral a solemn affair - a tiresome ceremony where everybody had to be long of face, short of stay, quick to cry and slow to enumerate the vices of the deceased.

Alternatively, she should have written, A funeral always implied a solemn affair to me, a person hailing from an orthodox family - a tiresome ceremony where everybody had to be long of face, short of stay, quick to cry and slow to enumerate the vices of the deceased in question.

Here is a quote from 'Little Dorrit' illustrating parallelism employed to advantage:

"There was the interminable Sunday of his nonage; when his mother, stern of face and unrelenting of heart, would sit all day behind a Bible."

As I said at the start, we should never lose sight of the goals of clarity, directness and economy. John Carey says in 'The Faber Book of Reportage' that the "power of language to confront us with the vivid, the frightening or the unaccustomed is equalled only by its opposite - the power of language to muffle any such alarms."

He then adds that bad reportage opts firmly for the second - the power of obfuscation - our word for this week.

'Obfuscate', a transitive verb, means 'confuse, bewilder, stupefy' and (figuratively) 'darken, obscure'. A person's mind may be obfuscated by liquor or drugs.

The word comes from the Latin 'obfuscare' (with English - ate) 'darken'. (Ob - against, in the way of + fuscus - dark). The noun is 'obfuscation'.

In style they are admirably simple, direct and uncluttered with medical obfuscation.

Obfuscator (noun) (thing that obfuscates) and obfuscatory (adjective) are also commonly used. An explanation that confuses one is obfuscatory.

Let us now consider some related words in the language.

Writing style

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