"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
Obfuscation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Fumblerules are humorous rules for writing, collected from teachers of English grammar...
- "Don't never use no double negatives."
- "Eschew obfuscation."
- "Never use a preposition to end a sentence with."
- "Avoid clichés like the plague."
- "The passive voice should never be employed."
- "You should not use a big word when a diminutive would suffice."
- "It is bad to carelessly split infinitives."
- "About those sentence fragments."
The opposite would be 'Newspeak':
The aim of Newspeak is to remove all shades of meaning from language, leaving simple concepts (pleasure and pain, happiness and sadness, goodthink and crimethink) that reinforce the total dominance of the State.
Newspeak - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
George Orwell was very critical about how we use language to confuse:
Jay Doubleyou: the poetry of english
Jay Doubleyou: turn off your tv
Readers can observe Orwell's preoccupation with language...
A perfect example of this development is the way the themes in "Politics and the English Language" anticipate Orwell's development of Newspeak in Nineteen Eighty-Four. One analyst, Michael Shelden, calls Newspeak "the perfect language for a society of bad writers (like those Orwell describes in "Politics and the English Language") because it reduces the number of choices available to them". Developing themes Orwell began exploring in this essay, Newspeak first corrupts writers morally, then politically, "since it allows writers to cheat themselves and their readers with ready-made prose".
Politics and the English Language - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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