"The fallacy of Moliére's physician"

"In one of his plays, Moliére has a physician asked this question: 'How is it that opium is able to put people to sleep?' The physician replies with great profundity that it is because opium has 'dormitive properties', and this answer is found entirely satisfactory by his interlocutors. I think we all have a tendency to deceive ourselves in this way. To use obscure and learned phrases, thinking thereby that we have obtained a deeper insight. I remember as a medical student reading the chapter on fractures in a manual of surgery; it began by stating that by a fracture is meant 'the dissolution of continuity in a bone'. This struck me quite as funny as Moliére's joke. It is a wise rule from time to time to force oneself to write down in simple language the precise meaning of any involved circumlocution we have got into the habit of using. If we did this we would find, I think, that such words as 'hysteria', 'psychopathic personality', 'character neurosis', are symbols of our ignorance rather than of any understanding."

M. O'C. Drury, The Danger of Words (1973), pp. 5-6.

http://www.ul.ie/~philos/vol1/drury.html