Obfuscators

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Individuals or systems that deliberately make information unclear
2. tools that obscure meaning or intent through complexity
3. techniques employed to confuse or distract from the truth

Etymology: The plural "obfuscators" simply takes the -s of "obfuscator," so the story belongs to the singular. "Obfuscator" is formed from "obfuscate," which comes from Latin "obfuscare," meaning "to darken" or "to cover over," built from "ob-" (over, against) and "fuscare" (to darken, from "fuscus," dusky). The original sense was physical: to make something dim or hard to see. English "obfuscate" arrived with that literal meaning of darkening before the figurative sense of making something unclear took over. The agent ending "-or" is the English suffix that turns a verb into a word for a person or thing that performs the action, so an "obfuscator" is literally one who darkens or muddies. Its ancestry runs through Latin "-tor," which passed through Old French "-eor" and Middle English "-our" before settling into the modern spelling. The result is a word that started out describing shadow and ended up describing the deliberate use of jargon, convolution and vagueness to hide what is really meant.