What is the 'it'?

Whenever I see a word in a judgment which I think I know the meaning of, but which is not all that common a word, I look it up in the online Oxford English Dictionary, just to be sure. This is not a bad habit to get into, because you never know when what you thought you knew might have been, in fact, wrong. And there aren’t many words (or usages of words) that are not in the online OED, which has the advantage of not being limited by annoying things like physical space.

Plus, because judges know (and read) a lot of things, they have an admirable but sometimes discombobulating tendency to use words in an uncommon – the OED might even say “archaic” – sense. I have to keep reminding myself not to assume that a judge has adopted a wrong word or a wrong usage of that word. Which is not to say they never do. But it pays to do your homework before dropping that kind of bombshell.

So, when a judge uses the word “abstruse”, the meaning of which I feel like I have a sense of – obscure, difficult to figure out – I take a minute to look it up. It turns out to have been a perfectly good word for the task. Tick. Job done.

But what the Oxford also told me – and which I definitely wasn’t expecting – was that, historically at least, “abstruse” had a second meaning: it is (or, at least, was) also a variant of the word “ostrich”. It seems to have come out of the word “struthious”. That makes some kind of sense. Struthious. Abstruse. Ostrich. Why not?

At least, that’s what the OED says. I can’t find support for it anywhere else. But it’s the Oxford. It must be right. Right?