"Complicate" = "elucidate the complexity of"

[Laurence Horn]

At 10:03 PM -0400 3/22/11, Joel S. Berson wrote:
>>From an announcement of a forthcoming Newberry Library
>Eighteenth-Century Seminar presentation by PROFESSOR DENA GOODMAN:
>
>Professor Goodman seeks to complicate the picture of
>nineteenth-century reactionary aristocrats and modern republicans by
>bringing an eighteenth-century perspective to bear on French
>revolutionary and post-revolutionary culture and society.
>
>I think I'll skip this -- historical life is complicated enough as it is.
>
>Joel

Isn't this what used to be called (in the good old days)
"problematizing" an issue rather than complicating it?  Maybe, since
"complicate" has another, somewhat less complicated, use, the term of
art should be "complexitize".  Or "compleximatize".

Perhaps Professor Goodman follows the old adage, not quite due to
Einstein, dictating that everything should be as complex as it can
be, but not more so.

LH

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