"Eschew obfuscation"
"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 ambiguity, adopt clarity", but the use of relatively uncommon words causes confusion, making the phrase an example of irony, and more precisely a heterological or hypocritical phrase (it does not embody its own advice).
The phrase has appeared in print at least as early as 1959, when it was used as a section heading in a NASA document.[3]
An earlier similar phrase appears in Mark Twain's Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses,[4] where he lists rule fourteen of good writing as "eschew surplusage".
The linguist Paul Grice used the phrase in the "Maxim of Manner", one of the Gricean maxims.
No comments:
Post a Comment