Can you see it? And can you hear it? Maybe it’s right in front of you, and you can’t discern it. Or maybe it’s somewhere you’re not looking… Unless you know to look there. Finding it may be just a matter of knowing how to look. Look, and listen, and all the other senses. And where is it? Generally, we imagine that it will be something that’s in some location, not hidden but hard to distinguish, like a snow leopard on a winter mountainside, but that’s not the only way. Encryption is a kind of camouflage, and that can involve scrambling or distributing and distracting – for example distributing the object in plain sight but in an unexpected way among other things. Do you, for example, see a word in the capital letters of this paragraph… camouflaged?
Acrostics and such like notwithstanding, we have usual expectations of camouflage, of course. Most often we’ll think of a mottled pattern on fabric, designed to make a non-moving person or thing blend in visually with a background. Taken outside of the intended context, such camouflage can be quite the opposite: jungle camo in an arctic environment or vice versa, for instance, or any bit of army camo worn to the grocery store (the Rice Krispies are not going to attack you! and they do not need to be snuck up on!) – especially when the person wears camo pants and a hi-vis jacket (make up your mind!). It becomes a matter of ostentation.
Mind you, ostentation can be camouflage too: if you can dazzle or distract, you can slip some things past unnoticed, or just confuse the opponent enough that they can’t manage to attack. (For example, you may be a huge nerd who would get a major wedgie, but they’re too confused by your hi-vis and camo, or so you hope.) Arisen, indeed, in sundry circumstances often associated with matters fiscal or forensic addressed by prolix pettifoggers or those habitually prone to obfuscation are without a doubt from time to time again thickets of recondite lexis and anfractuous syntax designed to obnubilate, or perhaps inneviate, the intent and – such as one may even say – sense of the sentence. And a barrage of sound, or even just an unexpected or misleading sound, can give cover for movements that might make noises. There’s more to this kind of camouflage, more than just colour and shape. If a sound is indistinct – muffled or overlaid – it might be taken for something else, even something that doesn’t actually exist (who’s going now, into a classiomatic?).
Other kinds of camouflage are used in speech and behaviour, too. Ask an autistic person who is accustomed to “masking” – changing speech and behaviour patterns to match those of neurotypical people, at least for as long as necessary. Ask, for that matter, anyone who behaves in ways that are contrary to their natural sense of self for the purpose of self-preservation or social advantage. Even taking on a different accent counts – and many people find it necessary for career advancement or at least for avoiding annoying stereotypes.
Under the not-so-sheltering skies of nature, camouflage is rife; animal mimicry and background matching can be found throughout the world, in prey and predators alike. Some kinds of functional camouflage may seem accidental or incidental in some contexts, not connected to depredation – a black cat lying in a pile of fashionable fabrics, perhaps, or a firefly in a discotheque. Does it still count if there is no intent to deceive or any special benefit from doing so? Because our word camouflage itself hides things about its nature.
For, yes, camouflage is a noun that is made from a verb – a verb that is actually a noun in disguise. Or perhaps the verb only disguised itself as a noun disguising itself as a verb. Past a certain point, the disguise becomes so successful as to be inscrutable.
Let’s start with the fact that camouflage is a borrowing into English from French, where it is a noun made from the verb camoufler (just as mirage is made from mirer, and garage is made from garer). But it may be that camoufler is a reconstrual of the noun camouflet, which means ‘affront’ or, more literally, ‘smoke blown maliciously up the nose from a paper cone’ (look, that’s just what Littré says, I think it’s strange too).
Alternatively, it may well be that a verb that would have been camouffer took on the appearance camoufler in imitation of camouflet. The verb in question came from Italian camuffare, ‘muffle the head’, which does has more resemblance to the sense of camouflage. Camuffare is made from ca-, short for capo ‘head’, plus muffare, ‘muffle’, which is, yes, from the same source as English muffle.
Guess what is the source of muffare is, this word that came from Romance Italian and French into Germanic English. It’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing that’s really a sheep in wolf’s clothing in sheep’s clothing (or vice versa): it came into Medieval Latin from Germanic roots, probably meaning ‘soft skin’ or ‘sleeve skin’. But we really can’t say that camouflagecamouflages words meaning ‘soft skin on the head’; the changes from the roots to the present form have been permanent, just as silly does not camouflage sælig, ‘blessed’, because it doesn’t mean that anymore. A modern word will not revert to an earlier form, and would not be recognized if it did. Yes, the camouflage on a snow leopard doesn’t change back when you spot it on the slope, but a snow leopard doesn’t become snow and rocks when it looks like snow and rocks – unlike words that change their meaning as they change their form.
Even kinds of wordplay such as puns aren’t really camouflage: the word is meant to be discerned in those cases. And malapropisms and eggcorns are accidental and don’t aim to deceive, so they may not count either. More likely cases of camouflage include what are often called “dog whistles”: turns of phrase that have special meanings to in-groups but pass unnoticed by others. And, of course, words that are obscured by other means: word search puzzles, optical illusions, perhaps some clever brand names… But mainly it is not that a word is camouflaged; it is that words are – can be – camouflage, ways of dissembling by resembling. Each word is a leaf on your clothes as you aim to blend into the foliage – or distract by misdirection: a capital caper.
Sesquiotica 