John Thank you for elaborating as I requested. I have a better appreciation of what you are pointing at. You also wrote, "My assumption is based on Wit's flavor of argument, which often seems wild and dreamlike, rather than those of a linguist of the academy.  His writing too, which you describe as vague, often seems more poetic than scientific." I would propose that it is possible to be obscure in a number of quite distinct way. There are formal presentations that can be perfectly rigorous but by appealing to little known or little used distinctions, have the quality of being obscure. You seem to be pointing to a quite distinct genus of obscurity. I observe that it is also perfectly possible to be completely metaphoric without being obscure. If in this exchange I write, that while in the Brasilian rain forest of the Amazon, I saw butterflies whose coloration and form of distribution of the colors was so spectacular that I suspect its overwhelming visual presentation actually operates as a defense, you may easily understand. If I simply say There are species of butterfly that so dazzle us with riotious flash of form and color so as to tranfixed while something moves deep within us. am I being obscure? It would be interesting for those readers with some background and competency in such distinctions to offer their perceptions. As a final provocation for this message, Is Alice through the Looking Glass obscure. As many readers probably know, it was written by a mathematician and contains any number of reasonably complex transformations, inversions... as a natural part of the story line. Written for kids, heh! Or for that matter, try Flatland. All the best, John