Obfuscating “obfuscation”

I was beset today by the years of linguistic avoidance. I learned the word “obfuscation,” oh, some time ago (My memory is associating it with the Dilbert books of my youth.). For whatever reason, though, my young eye scanned the word incorrectly, and it’s haunted me on a fairly low order ever since. I’m not sure if I read it as “obsufucation,” “obscfucation,” or worse, but I’ve always thought of it as featuring a particularly vicious combination of hard sounds towards the middle, and avoided its oral use altogether.

Until, yeah, today. The class discussion was a Marx reading, so you can imagine where “obfuscation” might have been precisely the right word for the occasion. Suddenly, I threw years of caution to the wind, and went out with it. Ob. S-f-cay. Shun. I went through maybe three consonant* configurations before giving up — at which point approximately half the class enlightened me to the four friendly syllables of “obfuscation.”

Ob. Fus. Cay. Shun.

I’m sure I’ll never get it right. Let’s all resolve not to trick me into trying, either.

*I can’t help but note the happy occasion presented here, where the word (”consonant”) or its opposite (”inconsonant”) would fit the sentence equally well.