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).
Hm; I was under the impression that, like, the old extension and the new extension were essentially the same—pointing to the same cluster of things—and the discovery of the glutamate receptor just clarified what it was exactly that that cluster had in common. I hadn’t considered the possibility that the word was actually used more generally in the past.
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).
Heat. Energy. Atom. Planet. Star. Element. Sky. Life.
Theory.
(Although I was primed on this by having recently made a comment mentioning creationists.)
Hm; I was under the impression that, like, the old extension and the new extension were essentially the same—pointing to the same cluster of things—and the discovery of the glutamate receptor just clarified what it was exactly that that cluster had in common. I hadn’t considered the possibility that the word was actually used more generally in the past.