Dysthymia is, in fact, Greek, not Latin, but anyone who knows ancient Greek would immediately understand the word. Greek and Latin used to be normal parts of a

Dysthymia is, in fact, Greek, not Latin, but anyone who knows ancient Greek would immediately understand the word. Greek and Latin used to be normal parts of a basic grammar- and high-school education, even at the beginning of the twentieth century; by the end of the century, we were instead teaching remedial English in universities. The consequent narrowing of both vocabulary and roots from which neologism might arise may be responsible for the growth of the unwieldy and confusing noun phrases serving as terms of art: would not "psychotrophium" sound better than Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinic? There's another factor at work in lengthy periphrasis, too: people seem to need length these days to lend credibility. For example, my church never calls itself a church now but always a "community of believers" or "faith community." Missionaries report not on tribes but "people groups." Monosyllables have fallen out of favor, because professionals must embrace sesquipedalian verbosity. Many of the ridiculously generic Latinate terms, by the way, especially in anatomy, were imposed in the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. The "hippocampus," for example, was a seahorse until 1587, when the term was applied to part of the brain. At the time, surgeons learned entirely in Latin, and they probably had no difficulty differentiating between medical and marine definitions based on context. As far as ancient Rome goes, or ancient Greece for that matter, homonymy (which is really what the author of the article means) and amphiboly were taught and warned against in the schools: clarity is a virtue for rhetoricians and a duty of dialecticians.