Comment on Uncategories and empty categories

Mon, 16 Feb 2015 10:26:53 GMT

The word savory long predates our modern understanding of umami. So when people use it, they could be using either the older, more general definition, or the newer, more specific definition. That is, before we knew that umami was a basic taste which represented glutamate receptors, other things that are related to umami would be considered part of the category of savory, like the experience of eating meat, for example. It seems a little bit silly that people chose to coopt an existing word to refer to a more specific phenomenon, but it's probably not the first time it has happened (although examples elude me at the moment).

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