Hidden meaning
I've always loved dictionaries. When I was young I would read them both for fun (hobby) and to waste time (pasttime). As I said before, words are cool little time-capsules, meaning one thing to one people, and sometimes evolving to fit new needs as the years and circumstances pass.
Each time I look up a word (for any reason – to check its meaning or to confirm its spelling), I mark it somehow. With a physical dictionary, I add a dot or a star next to the word. With dictionary apps, I use whatever feature is allowed. I do this for future-me, marking where I've been and, sometimes, admonishing myself for not having remembered or learned.
A couple/few weeks ago, I looked up "camouflage", a word I can never remember the proper spelling of. (Does the U come after the O? After the A? There is a U, right? Where does it live? Dammit! – Every time.) Tired of looking it up maybe once per year, I hoped to find something my brain could connect to in the word's history, its etymology. Something that would help me remember how to spell the stupid thing.
I didn't find it (I had to check again while writing this post), but I did find something almost beautiful in its history.
First, if you don't know, this kind of thing is camouflage:
It's typically a pattern that makes something more difficult to see from far away. It's often used by militaries to protect their members, who wear clothing designed like that (clothes they call "camos") or to protect war-making equipment, like tanks. (The poeple are "personnel"; the fighting equipment is called "matériel" – like "camouflage", another cool word that comes to English from French.)
You can use it metaphorically, to mean "to hide or obscure something", but generally the word is used to mean things patterned like the image above. And, spelled the same, it can be a verb, meaning "to hide/conceal something by using patterns like those above".
But here's the part I loved: camouflage may have come (in part) from the French word "camouflet", which is (according to the Oxford English Dictionary) a "whiff of smoke in the face".
Smoke blown into a face – which, if it happened to you, would prevent you from seeing clearly, just as camouflage does.
Patterns or smoke, the effect is the same: details fade, things are hidden, advantages are lost.