The word for today: obfuscated.

To make so confused or opaque as to be difficult to perceive or understand

Some of you may have heard of obfuscated code contests. I haven’t looked in a long time, but I do remember seeing them for perl and C and other languages. In a nutshell, it was a contest to see who would be able to write the most confusing yet functional code. There was usually a size limit too. One winner that I remember was about five lines long, and the output from the program was the source code for the program. Yet it would be difficult to determine that just from reading the code.

Which was the point.

My point is that I had an opportunity (or a need, depending on your point of view) to use the word “obfuscated” during a meeting today. You should have seen the looks I got. So the word itself served the purpose of its definition, which is to say, it confused the heck out of nearly everybody.