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I had to look up "abstruse". I understood it's meaning from context, but wasn't sure if it was a portmanteau of abstract and obtuse, or an actual word. I've h
by bbarn 11y ago
I had to look up "abstruse". I understood it's meaning from context, but wasn't sure if it was a portmanteau of abstract and obtuse, or an actual word. I've honestly never heard it in my life, and wouldn't stop someone saying it in a sentence, but it did stop my reading.
That made me wonder, does the fact that you sometimes have to listen to the spoken word over-estimate the impact the same words will have when written?
- benjiweber 11y agoNever read http://abstrusegoose.com/ http://abstrusegoose.com/ ?
- dredwerker 11y agoAbstruse - Big in the early 1800s according to the Google Ngram Viewer. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=7&case_insensitive=on&content=abstruse&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cabstruse%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?year_start=1800&year_e...
- ci5er 11y agoI use this word a lot in written critiques of way-too-clever segments of code at review time. Is there a better word to use instead in this situation?