WordNet

darkening or obscuring the sight of something
make obscure or unclear

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混乱 / 心を暗くすること
《文》…‘を'混乱させる,わかりにくくさせる / 〈人の心〉‘を'暗くする,曇らせる

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出典(authority):フリー百科事典『ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』「2012/10/10 08:42:58」(JST)

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For the term as used in computer science, see Obfuscated code.

Obfuscation (or beclouding) is the hiding of intended meaning in communication, making communication confusing, wilfully ambiguous, and harder to interpret.^{[citation needed]}

Background

Obfuscation may be used for many purposes. Doctors have been accused of using jargon to conceal unpleasant facts from a patient; American author Michael Crichton claimed that medical writing is a "highly skilled, calculated attempt to confuse the reader".^[1] B. F. Skinner, noted psychologist, commented on medical notation as a form of multiple audience control, which allows the doctor to communicate to the pharmacist things which might be opposed by the patient if they could understand it.^[2] Similarly text-based language, like some forms of leet, are obfuscated to make them incomprehensible to outsiders..

"Eschew obfuscation"

"Eschew obfuscation", also stated as "eschew obfuscation, espouse elucidation", is a humorous fumblerule used by English teachers and professors when lecturing about proper writing techniques.

Literally, the phrase means "avoid being unclear" or "avoid being unclear, support being clear", but the use of relatively uncommon words causes confusion, making the phrase an example of irony, and more precisely a heterological or hypocritical phrase (it does not embody its own advice).

The phrase has appeared in print at least as early as 1959, when it was used as a section heading in a NASA document.^[3]

An earlier similar phrase appears in Mark Twain's Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses,^[4] where he lists rule fourteen of good writing as "eschew surplusage".

The philosopher Paul Grice used the phrase in the "Maxim of Manner", one of the Gricean maxims.

Cryptography

In cryptography, obfuscation refers to encoding the input data before it is sent to a hash function or other encryption scheme.^{[citation needed]} This technique helps to make brute force attacks unfeasible, as it is difficult to determine the correct cleartext.

In network security, obfuscation refers to methods used to obscure an attack payload from inspection by network protection systems.

References

^ Appendix 25 - Medspeak
^ Skinner, B.F. (1957) Verbal Behavior p.232
^ United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA Technical Memorandum (1959), p. 171.
^ Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses (1895)

External links

Look up obfuscation in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

"Binghamton Research". http://research.binghamton.edu/BinghamtonResearch/2007/baloney.html.

English Journal

Letter to the editor in response to 'Low-dose metabolism of benzene in humans: science and obfuscation' Rappaport et al. (2013).

Price PS, Rey TD, Fontaine DD, Arnold SM.SourceThe Dow Chemical Company, Midland, MI 48674, USA.
Carcinogenesis.Carcinogenesis.2013 Jul;34(7):1692-6. doi: 10.1093/carcin/bgt101. Epub 2013 Mar 25.
PMID 23531477

Why ban the sale of cigarettes? The case for abolition.

Proctor RN.SourceDepartment of History, Stanford University, Bldg 200, Stanford, CA 94305, USA. rproctor@stanford.edu
Tobacco control.Tob Control.2013 May;22 Suppl 1:i27-30. doi: 10.1136/tobaccocontrol-2012-050811.
The cigarette is the deadliest artefact in the history of human civilisation. Most of the richer countries of the globe, however, are making progress in reducing both smoking rates and overall consumption. Many different methods have been proposed to steepen this downward slope, including increased
PMID 23591501

Hiding in plain sight: use of realistic surrogates to reduce exposure of protected health information in clinical text.

Carrell D, Malin B, Aberdeen J, Bayer S, Clark C, Wellner B, Hirschman L.SourceGroup Health Research Institute, Seattle, WA 98101, USA. carrell.d@ghc.org
Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA.J Am Med Inform Assoc.2013 Mar-Apr;20(2):342-8. doi: 10.1136/amiajnl-2012-001034. Epub 2012 Jul 6.
OBJECTIVE: Secondary use of clinical text is impeded by a lack of highly effective, low-cost de-identification methods. Both, manual and automated methods for removing protected health information, are known to leave behind residual identifiers. The authors propose a novel approach for addressing th
PMID 22771529