Clauses
What's an Anacoluthon?
I went in to see the doctor a while back and he said that I had, well, I didn’t know the word he used. It was too long and Latin based. I asked him what that meant, and he said, a cold (I think it was).
“If it is just a cold,” I asked, “then why not call it a cold?”
“Because we can’t charge you a lot of money to diagnose a cold,” he responded.
“No, really, why use a long complicated term when a short one would do?”
My doctor is a long-term personal friend, so we have lots of fun conversations. Honestly, part of the answer is to sound esoteric he said, but part of it is to be medically specific. “Cold” is a pretty large category, and I had a specific form.
But before we start blaming the medical profession for something, we should look at our own discipline and ask if we do the same thing. I snicker sometimes when I use the word “lexicon” to describe a dictionary. Why do we call it a “lexicon”? Perhaps there is an historically specific reason, but perhaps we like to sound especially learned.