*Word of the Day for Saturday, March 5, 2016
obscurantism \uhb-SKYOORr-uhn-tiz-uhm\, noun:
1. Opposition to the increase and spread of knowledge.
2. Deliberate obscurity or evasion of clarity.
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.”
*Dictionary.com Word of the Day
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