Is obviously a bad word. What someone likely means when he or she says "obviously" is "observably," as in "this is what is observable here," in which case "obviously" is the wrong word, because it implies a collusion of the speaker with the listener. What's obvious to you, however, may not be at all obvious to me. So it's a dangerous word, or at least a superfluous word, if you're really trying to understand something by discussing it with another person.
In The Rise of the New Physics, the writer D. A'Bro (that abbreviated name is all I know about him or her) says something like: the obvious is not necessarily credited with any deep significance in science. Which is one reason I love the movie A Serious Man. It's pretty much a frontal attack on the obvious, starting with the question of whether the old man in the Yiddish "cartoon" at the beginning of the movie is a dybbuk. I say "cartoon" because one of the Coens, in the interview included with the movie on the DVD, nostalgically compares this opening sequence to the cartoons that once-upon-a-time in U.S. theaters preceded the movie--and also back then, you could only see movies at the theater (unless they were old enough to appear occasionally on TV). No movie rentals in 1967! Not until about 1980.
