What's a good verb for when someone is expressing something in a cryptic or ambiguous fashion?
Specifically:
In re the quotation "...somebody has told Heruvimov that Rousseau was a kind of Radischev...", the first footnote to the essay "Hearts and Minds" says: "Scholars have seldom paired the two authors except to offer a cursory antithesis."
I would like to replace the word "says" in the above sentence with a verb that connotes "says, but so elliptically that honestly I'm not sure exactly what she means".
(Since this seems to have been confusing: The above quotation is a direct quotation. The footnote literally says the text in the quotation. But the quoted sentence, IMHO, is cryptic, gnomic, unclear, ambiguous. I'm looking for a way to indicate that IMHO the quoted sentence is cryptic, while still directly quoting it, and I'm looking specifically for a verb that I can use in this context. This is a [single-word-request].)
I'd like to avoid negative connotations; i.e. I'm looking for a verb form of cryptic, gnomic, delphic, ambiguous but not obfuscated, roundabout, obscure. Not that I have any of the latter lying around, either, though...
One might also say that in the song "Things are seldom what they seem" (HMS Pinafore, Act II), Buttercup and Captain Corcoran are verbing proverbs at each other; when Buttercup verbs "Skim milk masquerades as cream", the poor Captain cannot fathom her meaning.