obscure

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obscure

(ŏb-skūr′) [L. obscurus, hide]

1. Hidden, indistinct, as the cause of a condition.

2. To make less distinct or to hide.

References in classic literature ?

"More fell than hunger, anguish, or the sea," down to the last obscure sea-dog of the "old model," having but few words and still fewer thoughts, there could not be found, I believe, one sailor who has ever coupled a curse with the good or bad name of a ship.

View in context

Thereupon they quickened their pace, avoiding high roads, and following obscure paths tending more or less northward.

View in context

This monstrous building is completely out of place in that location as it obscures the Thornaby landscape and it disfigures the vista of the riverside.

Letter: Blot on landscape

Rabbi Baruch Frydman-Kohl powerfully argued in a January edition of the Canadian Jewish News that, by so exposing and emphasizing the physical workings of the human body, Body Worlds in fact obscures the sacred.

Hey Dr. von Hagens--these are human beings you're messing with

When Elbaum glosses over this he obscures the real origins of the New Communists.

Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che

This simplification obscures numerous inalienable links between time and the events that unfold in it--links that bind us with the realm of quality and point to the true nature of things as they really are.

Shadhrah 3

In Part 7 (pair), a Rorschach-like ambiguity in twenty-three-carat gold leaf, looking something like a detached human jawbone, hovers above another gory splash that again obscures the head of a nude male cadaver.

Lucy Skaer: counter gallery

Meanwhile, Ventura's plan would reduce current state payments to cities and towns, a complex subsidy system that obscures the true cost of local services.

The Body Politic

Bottom line, we live in a boundary-less universe where the intermingling of high/low art elements often obscures universal truth with transient fancy.

UP IN THE AIR

I observe that increasingly calendars are printed in a way that obscures the pattern of the week that Jews and Christians cherish, that is, from the first day (the Christian Lord's Day) to the seventh (the Jewish Sabbath), preferring to start on Monday with the five working days and finish with the weekend.

Debate ends (about when a century begins)

The very precise concern with details of punishment (with a fear of a return to punishment as public spectacle in the US), somewhat obscures more general and interesting issues about medieval and renaissance "spectacle," and a reading of depictions of the Passion that may frustrate the art and church historians, but attract some medics, while an interesting contribution to the history of punishment really requires more depth in chronicles or court records to satisfy social historians.

The Thief the Cross and the Whee: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe & Images and Relics: Theological Perceptions and Visual Images in Sixteenth-Century Europe