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profundicate

verb /pɹəˈfʌndɪˌkeɪt/

  1. To make profound; to make a concept unnecessarily complicated.

    rare

    To profundify or to profundicate: A Borenverb used to denote the use of thesauric and other enrichment techniques to make a simple idea appear to be profound. […] Graduates of agricultural institutions tend to use "to profundicate" while graduates of ivy league schools tend to use "to profundify".

Where it comes from

Latin profundus (“profound”) + -icate. Apparently coined by American humorist James Boren (1925–2010) in When in Doubt, Mumble: A Bureaucrat's Handbook, New York, N.Y.: Van Nostrand Reinhold Co., 1972, →OCLC.

Adapted from the Wiktionary entry profundicate (CC BY-SA 4.0).

← profligationprofundify →

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