Copy-editors and proofreaders need to develop a wide vocabulary. They should be fascinated by words and language. If you are not hooked on words, the life of a proofreader or editor is going to be very hard going and dull. If you are, it will give you a lot of pleasure and may not feel like work at all.
If you know what recondite means and you are aware of its derivation, that’s fine. You’re in a minority, but a good one. If you were proofreading or copy-editing and the author had used the word and you were unsure of its meaning or whether the author had used it correctly in context, there would be no choice: you would have to look it up. You couldn’t simply take a flyer and assume it was all right. The point is that you should really want to find out everything about a word. If you look it up but feel it’s a chore the job really isn’t for you. We all have wide gaps in vocabulary; nothing to be ashamed of there. But if we want to spend our working lives with words and we are determined to learn to proofread or to learn to copy-edit we must be sure that the raw material interests us.
Meaning
Recondite describes knowledge or a field of study which is little known, difficult or abstruse. The knowledge we give to you on our proofreading and copy-editing courses is not recondite; it is quite easy for any reasonably intelligent person to learn. But if we were giving correspondence courses and seminars on particle physics or linguistic philosophy they would certainly be very recondite indeed! The Latin root of the word reconditus means hidden or put away and this comes from the Latin verb condere to hide or store. So you can see that originally the word might have had a connotation of deliberate difficulty or obscurity; not now, however.
The point of this little post was not to test your vocabulary, but to pose the question: are you fascinated by words? If you are, you should learn to proofread or copy-edit and work in a job you may love.