>You're telling him which things he finds obfuscating?
>
>I find icons obfuscating. Or am I wrong about that?

Icons are signifiers - they don't really represent, depict nor are they images of an ob/subject. They are supposed to signify, to mean, to symbolize.

But to understand a sign which is a symbol, you need to know the whole symbology, and that's where it goes haywire. Imagine an icon of a haystack - is it going to open a view into the system stack, or is it going to open advanced search?

Take the floppy icon. It's forever stuck showing a 3.5 inch diskette with most of it being the sticker - not a 5.25, not an 8", not a 3" (which looked the same, anyway), even on today's machines which have no floppy drive at all. I stopped carrying mine to the next machine when the kids' schools finally accepted homework done on a thumbdrive. What's the icon for thumbdrive?

Or, take any icon, and chances are you will run into cultural differences, mistaken meanings... just as bad as a misnomer can be (pajero vs montero, for example), or as the regular ambiguity in English (see link below) can lead to a mistake.