Joe Sixpack American

Word of the Day for Thursday, November 3, 2011

obscurantism \uhb-SKYOORr-uhn-tiz-uhm\, noun:

1. Opposition to the increase and spread of knowledge.

2. Deliberate obscurity or evasion of clarity.

Back in the heady days of the B.O.'s run at the White House, the Main Stream Media was suffering from a terminal case of obscurantism and obfuscation when it came to his past and what he actually believes and stands for; nothing seems to have changed since then!

--Spy Maker, JSA's Blog

Of course they're not. That's why there were all those confrontations, all that aggression and obscurantism. Because the forces of darkness are dying, and they are thrown back on such things as a last resort.-- Paulo Coelho, The Witch of Portobello

In these he had shown himself a stalwart champion of Christian doctrine at its most precise and purest, equally remote from the modern laxity and obscurantism of the past.-- Albus Camus, The Plague

Obscurantism originally comes from the Latin root obscur meaning “dark” and the suffix -ant which turned a verb into a noun (as in the word servant), so the word literally meant “one that makes dark.”