abstruse: Dictionary.com Word of the Day 

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Word of the Day for Monday, June 25, 2007

abstruse \\ab-STROOS; uhb-\\, adjective:

Difficult to comprehend or understand.

 Einstein's theories of relativity, so abstruse yet so disturbing
 in the popular press of the 1930s. 
 -- David J. Skal, Screams of Reason
 

 One should be particularly suspicious when abstruse mathematical
 concepts (like the axiom of choice in set theory) that are used
 rarely, if at all, in physics -- and certainly never in chemistry
 or biology -- miraculously become relevant in the humanities or
 the social sciences. 
 -- Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense
 

 What attracts students to the study of a foreign language is not
 its appearance as an abstruse code saying the very same things
 that are said more simply in their mother tongue, but, rather,
 the opening up of a new world by the foreign language. 
 -- Jackie-Ann Ross, "New Zealand's Educational TV"
 

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Abstruse comes from Latin abstrusus, past participle of abstrudere,
"to push away from any place, to hide," from ab-, abs-, "away from"
+ trudere, "to push, to thrust."

Dictionary.com Entry and Pronunciation for abstruse


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