Something abstruse is difficult to understand.
The Latin word abstrūsus , which can be translated as “hidden” , came to Spanish as abstruse . It is an adjective that is used to describe something that is difficult to understand .
difficult to understand
The abstruse is something whose understanding is difficult . Therefore it requires certain knowledge or intellectual effort . It is common for the term to refer to intricate texts , of great depth or technical vocabulary .
The fact that content is abstruse is not necessarily good or bad. Sometimes, the theme is complex in itself or the author's style carries a certain degree of difficulty. However, the speech can become abstruse without meaning, so this characteristic represents a shortcoming of its creator.
Let's look at a simple example . Journalists often want the information they provide to reach as many recipients as possible and to be accessible. Therefore, if precipitation is recorded in the early hours of the day, a communicator should indicate that it is a “rainy morning” and not a “rainy dawn.” This second expression is abstruse and can cause many people not to know what it means.
Economists, doctors, and other professionals, on the other hand, may use plain, clear language to reach more people or employ abstruse vocabulary . This usually depends on the objective of the issuer or the context: while an academic document intended for other specialists is normal for it to be abstruse for those who are not experts in the field, a note published in a mass circulation newspaper has to be simple to understand.
Synonyms and etymology
We are faced with a term that not only represents a part of the language that is not very accessible or difficult to understand for many people, but is itself rarely used in everyday speech. Before delving into its etymology, therefore, we can take a look at some of the most frequent synonyms: unattainable, difficult, unintelligible, incomprehensible, obscure, inaccessible, abstract, hidden, confusing and deep . Although all of them do not have the same meaning, we can say that they symbolize those concepts that cannot be seen with the naked eye, that require certain tools or a particular effort for them to materialize before our eyes. On the contrary, some of its antonyms are understandable, easy and clear .
Having exposed these alternatives to this word we can move on to talk about its etymology. This is a cultism of Latin, specifically of the term abstrusus ; This means that it arrived late in our language, and for that reason it has not undergone the typical phonetic transformations that we do appreciate in other, older ones. In its original language, its meaning was very similar, including the idea of " secret ", and it was the perfect participle of abstrudere , which can be defined as "dissimulate, conceal or hide", although in its origins it meant "to push to a great extent." distance". For its part, this is made up of the prefix abs- and the verb trudere ("throw, drag outwards, throw, push vigorously").
If doctors always used technical terms, their messages would be abstruse to patients.
Some language scholars believe that the latter is linked in its root with the term trux, trucis ("wild, ferocious, rude, fierce"), from which we obtained truculent , or from the Greek word τρύω , which gives the idea of wear and tear. after rubbing an object or "consuming."
This opens the doors to two well-defined possibilities: if the origin of abstruse were found in trux , then it would also be related to the Indo-European root *tres , which gives the idea of "through" and is usually associated with the prefix trans and the words truncate and trunk . If, however, its origin were in the Greek τρύω , the correct Indo-European root would be *terə-1 , which indicates "to drill, turn or rub" and we find it in crush, tribulation and wheat , among other Spanish words.