He may be Britain's Prime Minister, but Gordon Brown has been deemed too obscure to merit a place in Madame Tussauds.
The College Board hasn't yet cited examples of words deemed too obscure, but "punctilious," "phlegmatic" and "occlusion" are three tough ones in an official study guide.
As the concept of the female athlete buds in the Middle East, they're women who not only chose a sport, which is unusual, but a sport usually deemed both obscure and masculine, which is really unusual.
And though words like "obsequious" may have been deemed too obscure for the new test, they remain worth learning in order to navigate the complexity of college-level texts and to communicate ideas clearly, as this essay illustrates.
She gives the example of Thomas Jefferson, who literally took scissors to his editions of the New Testament and excised anything he deemed too obscure or contradictory — out went the miracles.
There was, first, the small matter of which eight artists to include - they had to be suitably well-known that the majority of our readers would have heard of them, so this meant that some magnificent lyricists - Will Oldham, Smog, Joanna Newsom, and John Darnielle among them - were deemed too obscure.
Products like smartphones have thus far been unimpacted by fees leading to product price spikes, but other electronics could potentially be hit, due to what Reuters deems "an obscure subheading of data transmission machines in the sprawling list of U.S. tariff codes".
GOP lawmakers are dismantling regulations they deem overreaching and burdensome using an obscure law known as the Congressional Review Act, or CRA, which can be used to undo any regulation within 60 days of its finalization.
Eminent historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. deemed the film "morally pretentious, intellectually obscure and inordinately long ... a film out of control".
