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 a historically
specific reason, but perhaps we like to sound especially learned.
Or how about “anacoluthon”? This is a Greek term that
means “a sentence or construction that lacks grammatical sequence”
(an + akolouthos, “not following”).
In general parlance, it is just a sentence fragment. Why not call it a
“grammatical error”? Well, perhaps we can be more specific than using the broad
category of “grammatical error,” and perhaps some of us recoil a bit in saying
that the Bible has an “error.” So we take a deep breath and say that this verse
exhibits anacoluthon.
