word usage - "I obfuscated our conversation with loud music to avoid recording."


This answer to the question Camouflage is to sight as ____ is to sound? includes the sentence:


"I obfuscated our conversation with loud music to avoid recording."


The linked definition says:



The action of making something obscure, unclear, or unintelligible.
‘when confronted with sharp questions they resort to obfuscation’
[count noun] ‘ministers put up mealy-mouthed denials and obfuscations’


Origin: Late Middle English: from late Latin obfuscatio(n-), from obfuscare ‘to darken or obscure’ (see obfuscate).



The most up voted answer there (and the one I like) is mask. When I think of obfuscate, I think of manipulating information to confuse or misdirect someone's interpretation of a situation or a communication, so I was surprised to see this use.


Yes, sound is information in some sense, but the information we extract from the sound of speech is not the same as the initial waveforms and vibrations in the air.


Can one obfuscate a conversation by masking it acoustically? Is this a proper use of obfuscate, or is it a bit of a stretch?



Answer



That's not how I would use obfuscate.


I think you can make (especially in reference to spoken communication) a distinction between making a conversation difficult to understand and making it difficult to discern.


Obfuscation could involve using slang, overly convoluted language, code words, phonological transformations such as pig Latin, etc. These are all things that would make it hard for an eavesdropper who can clearly discern the sounds made in the conversation to understand what was actually being communication.


Playing loud music (or whispering, or replacing some or all of the spoken words with gestures or written notes) makes the conversation harder to discern, and that isn't obfuscation as I understand the word.


Imagine if there was a written transcript of the conversation. If the transcript is complete and accurate and the conversation is still hard to understand, it may have been deliberately obfuscated by the conversationalists. Playing loud music just makes it harder to get the complete and accurate transcript.


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