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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> 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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Particular contexts or milieus call for particular levels of style; for example, use of the right word or words seems more important in formal speech or writing than informal. For formal speech or writing that will be widely published and widely discussed, intensive searches for the right words and right phrases are worthwhile. 

The language chosen for discourse is much less of a style-determining factor than is the context of discourse.