abstruse

“‘You Americans are abstruse,’ I can’t forget his saying one night while we watched TV. My philosophy professor had assigned a French essay on wrestling, but I’m not good at French so was viewing the Worldwide Wrestling Championship Tournament instead. ‘What does abstruse mean,’ I humbly inquired. ‘To be abstruse means to be recondite....’ ‘So what does recondite mean,’ I tried again. ‘Oh, it’s something hard to understand.’ ‘Don’t patronize me. Just tell me what it means.’” Jane Ransom; Bye-Bye; NYU Press; 1997.