affinage
AFF-in-arge
noun
The process of ageing cheese
Just a quick one this week, as I couldn’t think of anything more interesting. Please feel free to make suggestions for words you’d like to know more about!
I stumbled across this word in an article about an employment tribunal. The employee in question worked at a cheese manufacturer in some capacity, and was ‘demoted to affinage’ when she became pregnant. Not knowing anything about cheese or its manufacture I had to look up ‘affinage’ and had to take it as read that it was a demotion from whatever she was doing before.
Appropriately, ‘affinage’ is a French word. The verbal form ‘affiner’ means ‘to refine’ and originally comes from the Latin words ‘ad finis’ meaning ‘towards the end / limit’.
In my naivete I assumed that affinage simply involved putting the cheese into a cool dark room and waiting until it’s ‘done’. The Academy of Cheese (which is a real thing, apparently) disabused me of this notion, however, and says that a great deal of work is put into affinage, to such an extent that, since 2021, the academy has run a competition to find ‘Affineur of the Year’.
So, if this word nonsense bears no fruit (and there’s no sign of that happening any time soon) I could always train to become a Master of Cheese (also a real thing).