Question: Recently, this forum has seen many questions of the *what is the single word for* type.

Is this really such a concern in English?

Single words such as obfuscate or elucidate can obfuscate as much they can elucidate.

This quest for a single word might be considered stylistically important in some languages but how important is it in English?

Answer: 
I know that tag is called **single**-word-requests, but I think it's a mistake to get hung up on that word. What these types of questions are really asking for is a concise way to express a concept, and a single word —being as concise as you can get— is the ultimate goal; but you can't always reach that goal, and that's OK.

That said, some s-w-r questions do explicitly want a single-word answer, sometimes because of space considerations in a user interface or some similar programming need, but also sometimes because the OP wants to construct a sentence a particular way (perhaps because of parallelism or poetic considerations) which requires a single word. This doesn't mean that English speakers/writers are particularly hung up on single words; it just means that these situations are, in a sense, *harder* than situations where a whole descriptive phrase can be used. In other words, if a writer can take as many words as he needs to describe a concept, he'll do so, and we here on ELU will never hear about it.
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> Is this really such a concern in English?
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> This quest for a single word might be considered stylistically important in some languages but how important is it in English?
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Why is English different from other languages? The difference is not the language but why you need a single word for a certain concept.

Getting a single word is often good in terms of Linguistic Economy (usually languages seek that), and if there's a case where you need one word (for a title, a website, etc) then yes, it's important. There must be other reasons certainly, I must have forgotten something.