The Latin for taste gave English savour, sapient, and insipid – and a wise man is literally a man of taste
Sapores in Camden holds a 4.1 from sixteen hundred and eight people, charges twenty to sixty pounds, and the word means flavours.
And it has given English rather more than it looks.
Sapor
Latin. It means taste, or flavour.
And sapere, the verb, means both to taste and to know.
Which is not a coincidence and which is not a pun. The Romans genuinely used one word for both, and the metaphor is old, and it survives everywhere in English.
What came out of it
Savour. Obviously.
Sapient – wise. And Homo sapiens, which is the name our own species gave itself, and which means, literally, the man who tastes.
We called ourselves the tasting man. Not the thinking man – the tasting one. The metaphor got there first and nobody has ever corrected it.
Insipid – which is in-sapidus, without taste – and which in English means both flavourless and dull, without anybody ever having to explain the connection.
Sage, the wise man. And sage, the herb, which comes from salvia and is a different word entirely and which everybody assumes is the same.
The Prat’s etymological desk has assessed the corpus across seven postcodes and reports that sapor is the single most productive root in the entire drinking vocabulary.
Taste as judgement
Which is the metaphor doing its work, and which is worth noticing because it is doing something ideological.
To say a person has taste is to say they have judgement – and specifically, that they have the right judgement, which is to say the judgement of the class that decides.
Taste is not a neutral faculty. It has been, for most of the history of the word, a claim about status.
And the word for lacking it is vulgar, which means, precisely, of the common people.
Which is this entire survey
Seven postcodes. Seven hundred and eight articles.
The snob screens at the Argyll Arms, so the saloon bar could not see the public bar. The gin palace, built to be brighter than home. The rope, which is a lease negotiation in fancy dress.
The word for good judgement in English is a word about the tongue, and it has been used, for four hundred years, to tell people they do not belong in the room.
Verdict
Good bar, honest number.
Go, and taste something, and be sapient about it.
The five tastes
Which is what the tongue actually does, and there are five, and the fifth took a century to be accepted.
Sweet. Salt. Sour. Bitter.
And umami, which was identified in Japan in 1908 – the savoury, meaty depth of glutamates, present in Parmesan, in anchovies, in soy, in tomatoes, in stock.
The West did not accept it as a basic taste for the better part of a century, and dismissed it, and eventually the receptors were found and the argument ended.
The tongue map you were taught at school – sweet at the tip, bitter at the back – is also wrong, and has been known to be wrong since the 1970s, and is still in textbooks.
Chelsea Bloom is an emerging comedic writer with a focus on light-hearted satire and observational humour. Influenced by London’s student culture and digital comedy spaces, Chelsea’s work reflects everyday experiences filtered through a quirky, self-aware lens.
Expertise is growing through experimentation and study, while authority comes from authenticity and relatability. Trustworthiness is supported by clear intent and ethical humour choices.
Chelsea’s contributions represent developing talent within an EEAT-compliant framework that values honesty, clarity, and reader trust.
Somewhere someone’s reading this at work recognizing their exact job, their exact despair. They’re updating CV.
This reads like someone’s been to every meeting they shouldn’t have been at, taking obsessive notes and processing administrative trauma into literature.