[Rails] Why use send when you can call the method directly?

I am reading through some code in active_record/relation/query_methods - def build_where (about line 230); and there are a couple of calls to send.  Here's the first one

[@klass.send(:sanitize_sql, other.empty? ? opts : ([opts] + other))]

and here's the second one

attributes = @klass.send(:expand_hash_conditions_for_aggregates, opts)

Why do we use send here when we could just call the method directly?

I mean, why is the first call not just

[@klass.sanitize_sql( other.empty? ? opts : ([opts] + other))]

Puzzled.

William

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