abstrusity

When was the last time you ordered a credit report? The paper document is abstruse enough, but you have to maneuver through the morass of oddly-named companies that produce them — Equifax, Experian, TransUnion and more. The process is abstract, but the results are concrete. There’s some new, and bad, news about those infamous numbers. More than a quarter of Americans now have scores of 599 or lower. …

Of the four tiers of high school, sophomore is the year that stands out as strange. Freshman, junior, and senior are relatively clear monikers for their associated levels, and it’s funny that in school, the place where you are most expected to know the how and why of everything, second-year students are called by a term whose roots are abstruse. Then there is the problem …