Idiom
dormitive virtue
Meaning
A type of tautology in which an item is explained in terms of the item itself, only put in different (usually more abstract) words.
Meaning adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Examples
“Explaining sleep by calling it a dormitive virtue explains nothing.”
“He uses a dormitive virtue when he says the machine works because of its power.”
“The scientist criticized the theory as a dormitive virtue because it defined the process using the very term it tried to explain.”
“The professor argued that saying people are poor because they lack wealth is a dormitive virtue that fails to address the actual causes of poverty.”
“When you claim a drug works because it has healing properties, you are just using a dormitive virtue instead of explaining the chemistry.”
“By attributing the sedative effect of the medicine to a dormitive virtue, the author merely restated the observation without providing any genuine scientific insight into the underlying mechanism.”
Examples
simple
“Explaining sleep by calling it a dormitive virtue explains nothing.”
“He uses a dormitive virtue when he says the machine works because of its power.”
contextual
“The scientist criticized the theory as a dormitive virtue because it defined the process using the very term it tried to explain.”
“The professor argued that saying people are poor because they lack wealth is a dormitive virtue that fails to address the actual causes of poverty.”
“When you claim a drug works because it has healing properties, you are just using a dormitive virtue instead of explaining the chemistry.”
complex
“By attributing the sedative effect of the medicine to a dormitive virtue, the author merely restated the observation without providing any genuine scientific insight into the underlying mechanism.”
Origin
A calque translation of Latin, virtus dormitiva, coined by Molière in The Imaginary Invalid. In the play, he lampoons a group of physicians providing an explanation in macaronic Latin of the sleep-inducing properties of opium as stemming from its "virtus dormitiva".
Key words
Related idioms
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