Deliberate Obfuscation

Day 69: Obfuscate: to cloud or obscure; to cause confusion; to make difficult of comprehension or interpretation; to make unnecessarily complex; to throw into shadow or make difficult to see.

William Fraser Tolmie takes the prize. I've stayed in touch with Arnie, our former Plant Ecologist, since his retirement a year ago, and a few weeks back, he mentioned to me that he was working on a project which required transcription of some of Tolmie's letters and journals, copies of which he had obtained from the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew (London). He was finding them particularly difficult to read, so I asked him if he'd like me to take a look. I have some background in deciphering mid-19th Century handwriting, having transcribed something to the effect of 100,000 birding records for Patuxent Nature Center's Bird Phenology Program. Arnie sent me one of the "folios" and I zipped through the first page like a knife through hot butter. I thought, "This is going to be easy!" Then I turned to page two and began struggling through faded ink and stains, putting question marks wherever it was illegible. It didn't help that Tolmie had recorded many plant names in transliteration from "Tshinook" jargon; there was no hope for those, and even some of his Latin terminology was archaic and unreadable. I eventually finished the first folio to the best of my ability, and with a few notes and potential corrections, Arnie sent it off to Kew where it will become part of their archives. I've just finished a second folio, working with hard copies as well as digital in a variety of enhanced versions. It's tough going.

Neither Arnie nor I are looking forward to the dreaded "Folio 192," which is cross-written with text running both vertically and horizontally on the same page. To me, it looks more like a weaving draft than penmanship. In his search for clearer copies, Arnie discovered that Tolmie had written it in that manner in purposeful obfuscation, to make it difficult for anyone but his colleague and friend Hooker, long used to Tolmie's peculiarities, to decipher, not thinking in the least of the future generations who might wish to refer to it. Of course, Tolmie probably never expected to achieve any particular fame as a botanist, nor to become a household word in the annals of Pacific Northwest history, but you never know. Could anyone read my handwritten notes-to-self on Myriosclerotinia caricis-ampullaceae or on Cephalanthera austiniae? Sometimes I can't!