oh-BLEEK
His oblique comments about the merger made everyone uneasy.
Fun Fact
In geometry, an oblique line is one that is angled—not perpendicular or parallel. In conversation, it works the same way: someone being oblique is avoiding direct language. Politicians, poets, and diplomats often speak obliquely to suggest things without stating them outright.
muh-RAS
(noun) A complicated and confusing situation that is extremely difficult to escape or make progress through.
What began as a simple contract dispute had become a morass of litigation, counter-claims, and procedural delays that no one involved could see the end of.
Morass derives from the Dutch moeras, meaning “marsh” or “swamp,” itself from the Old French marais — “marsh.” It entered English in the 17th century with its literal meaning of boggy, waterlogged ground before quickly acquiring its figurative sense of any situation that traps and exhausts in the same way a physical swamp does — something that looks passable until you’re already in it and discovering that every step forward costs more than the last.
Fun Fact
The Battle of Passchendaele in 1917 is considered one of history’s most literal examples of a morass destroying a military campaign. Heavy shelling had destroyed the drainage system of the low-lying Flemish landscape, turning the entire battlefield into a sea of liquid mud so deep that men, horses, and artillery pieces disappeared into it entirely. British commanders who had never visited the front were reportedly stunned when they finally saw the conditions firsthand — one senior officer is said to have wept and asked why no one had told him. The battle cost over half a million casualties on both sides and advanced the front line by approximately five miles, producing what military historians still cite as the definitive example of a strategic morass in every sense of the word.
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