A query on translation

[Terrance]

"P. Chevalier" wrote:
> 
> Mmmmh, "borrowing" would have been meaningful too, indeed!
> but it was just a mistake... I wish I could play as easily with English
> words and create my own "portemanteau words"!

This entire thread is a bit too obscure for me. There are two sorts of
obscurity that I find in the posts here. One is due to negligence and
the other to willfulness.  I suspect that people often write obscurely
because they have never taken the time to write clearly. It may seem odd
that people dedicated to the study of a master of language would not be
sufficiently sensitive to the beauty of language to write if not
beautifully at least with perspicuity. Yet I find in the posts here,
sentence after sentence that I must read twice. Often I can only guess
at the sense. Sometimes a second post will make clear that writers have
evidently not said what they intended. At times, it's obvious that the
writer is himself not quite sure of his meaning. He has some vague
impression of what he wants to say, but has not, either from lack of
mental power of from laziness, exactly formulated it in his mind and it
is natural enough that he should not find a precise expression for a
confused idea. This is owed to the fact that many writers think, not
before they write, but as they write. There are advantages and
disadvantages to this method of composition. One obvious disadvantage,
and it is a danger against which the author must be always (almost wrote
must always be...)...

Would that be obscure enough? 

on his guard (almost wrote his/her but thought better of it_ is that
there is a sort of magic in (insert "written" here) words. Ideas acquire
substance (for you philosophers) by taking on a visible nature, and then
stands in the way of its own clarification. Is that clear? Making sense?
Am I? But this sort of obscurity merges very easily into the willful.
Some writers who do not think clearly are inclined to suppose that their
gay thoughts have a significance greater than at first sight appears. It
is flattering (almost wrote flattery) to believe that they (thoughts?
author of?) are too profound to be expressed so clearly that all ride a
bike may read, and very naturally it does not occur to such writers that
the fault is with their own minds which have not the faculty of clear (X
cross) precise reflection. Here again the magic of the written word
obtains. It is quite easy to convince oneself that a phrase that one
does not quite understand may mean a great deal more than one realizes.
>From this there is but a tad along the way to go to the ditch where
blind men fall into the habit and the elephant shit while they feel
about, touching this, and that,  and the other thing,  gaining
impressions in all their vagueness and profundity. Mad Kings can always
be brought before fools to make sense of them. Most maddening and
foolish yet are the obscurities of a willful sort that mask (X Cross S/B
masquerade) as aristocratic exclusiveness. The author,  most often an
native English language maven, wraps his meaning in subtle insults and
calls it a reasoned and prescribed grammatical reply to a vulgar post he
can't understand.