Word of the Day Archive
Monday May 3, 2004
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"
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
