In his book The Force of Law, Frederick Schauer is surprisingly insistent that pineapple wine is wine. Deploying Schauer’s observation as a point of departure, I here examine two-word compound terms in law. Taking terms associated with, for example, privacy in illustration, I explore the problems encountered by academic and juristic articulation of compound terms, demonstrating that many perceived difficulties arise because of inadvertent logical mistake and linguistic oversight. Through this analysis I show that we have often been too quick to impute to concepts a meaning that is stipulated or otherwise technical, where those understandings are in fact ordinary and commonplace. This analysis suggests that greater methodological ground-clearing is required before drawing conclusions about distinctive, distinguishable vocabularies and languages in law and legal reasoning.