About 18 months ago I spoke with a man in a business situation about practical wisdom growing out of consciously structured practical skill development, in the course of a getting to know you conversation. He mentioned to me that I had a "wizened air" trying to refer to this kind of wisdom...

...and then he realized he'd just called a women "wizened" who was clearly less than 35, and remembered that the term is usually used to imply "age, wrinkles, and gray hair" rather than "theory and experience enhanced character". Then he got all apologetic with "Wait I didn't mean... um... that you seem... um... but of course..." and so on. His stumble and eventual repair was kind of cute. In any case, I took the whole thing as a compliment :-)

However, since that time I've wondered about whether the modern usage of "wizened" might be a corruption from a time when the world and the economy were conducive to old people having a lot of practically useful accumulated lessons about the way the world really is, so that wrinkles and smallness were frequently a sign of being very cognitively adapted to reality. A some point some people might have seen the term "wizened" being applied to people who had both the trait of physical age and the trait of "having been made wise by life" and inferred that the term was meant to be used specifically for the physical signs of age itself. Subsequent use, based on such a misapprehension, and codification of this usage, might have lead to the modern definition of wizened. Maybe?

Supporting evidence may lurk in the etymology of "wizard"?

WIZARD mid-15c., "philosopher, sage," from M.E. wys "wise" (see wise (adj.)) + -ard. Cf. Lith. zynyste "magic," zynys "sorcerer," zyne "witch," all from zinoti "to know." The ground sense is perhaps "to know the future." The meaning "one with magical power" did not emerge distinctly until c.1550, the distinction between philosophy and magic being blurred in the Middle Ages.

The etymology of witch is less obvious but possibly related to the same processes?