Hippocrates — "The chief virtue that language can have is clearness, and nothing detracts from …"
The chief virtue that language can have is clearness, and nothing detracts from it so much as the use of unfamiliar words.
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Understanding this quote
What it means
Clear, simple language is the highest quality writing or speech can achieve. Using obscure, uncommon, or unnecessarily complex words actively undermines understanding. Effective communication prioritizes the audience's comprehension above demonstrating vocabulary or erudition. Plain language serves truth better than ornate expression.
Relevance to Hippocrates
As a physician treating patients across Greek communities, Hippocrates depended on precise, accessible communication to convey diagnoses and treatment instructions. His medical writings deliberately used straightforward terminology so practitioners and patients alike could understand. Clarity was not merely aesthetic preference but a professional imperative — misunderstood instructions could kill.
The era
In ancient Greece, sophists and rhetoricians prized elaborate, florid speech as markers of education and status. Medical knowledge was often mystified through ritual and priestly language. Hippocrates deliberately broke from this tradition, insisting medicine be grounded in observable fact communicated plainly, separating rational medicine from the obscuring religious and philosophical vocabulary dominating intellectual discourse.
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