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Wine language – false friends and confusing terms

jumbled speech illustration

The wine world is filled with words that are easily confused or misused. Here are some of the most common.

Language is not set in stone but in some instances the evolution of a word, or misuse that slowly becomes the norm, results in a loss of precision or clarity.

In an earlier life, BW (before wine), as a language-specialist copy-editor for Cambridge University Press working mostly on books about French, German and linguistics, I had the pleasure of editing a book by Jean Aitchison, Emeritus Rupert Murdoch Professor of Language and Communication at the University of Oxford, entitled Language Change: Progress...