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: 
Given the astonishing number of English words, there often is an astonishingly apt single word choice. I think asking about the single word silver bullet may be a way of saying: Surprise and delight me again, English: can it be done, is there one word that covers this? English is normally so fit for this, that when a word is missing, it just grabs it. Ergo, *Schadenfreude*.
From the non-native speaker's perspective, English is the language where so many things can be expressed by single word. So I feel uncomfortable when I can't find single word for something that can be described by single word in my native language. I feel I'm missing something. And I think I'm not the only one who feels like that.

Anyway, the ability to express something by single word instead of repeating ten-word description ten times makes you more expressive. This is also the economy of the language.

And yes, single word is much more appropriate for column name in database than five words. It is not only the beautification, there's 30-character name limit in some databases, and files in DOS had some day 8-character limit.