as many of you quo, i have been a university professor for nearly a quarter century, but you may not know that before that as a kid in the ghetto of detroit, my schoolmates teased me. they predicted what i would become long before i would know my destiny. i won a couple of spelling bees and later a few contests as well. so i guess you could say my love for words started when i was knee high to a tadpole. back then when i didn t know a word my mama used to tell me, look it up in the dictionary. boy, those were the days when a kid actually had to turn to a physical volume that contained the wonder of the worded world. now you just google it. the merriam-webster dictionary was my favorite along with the oxford english dictionary. tonight, i want to introduce you to the dyson-ary. get it? each night this week, i ll define a word in his political, cultural, and moral context. tonight s word is obfuscate. here is a quick example.