I don't understand your point at all.

I can be mowing my lawn when it's 110F outside and say, "Gosh, I'm boiling." But if a recipe tells me to "boil" something, and it means anything other than put it in 212F water with heat applied in such a way that the water is bubbling, then the recipe is a shitty recipe, and I will diagnose the author with a confusion of the mind. The fact that the term now encompasses a much broader range of meaning in other contexts is completely irrelevant: I am not in those other contexts, in this context, it is a word with a very specific meaning.

The Slate article and this very HN discussion (broadly, not this sub-thread) are evidence that the phrase “caramelized onions” does not appear to have a singular, very specific meaning in this context. If it did, cookbooks wouldn’t make the claim and the Slate article and this discussion wouldn’t exist.

I suspect half of cookbooks are badly written and worsely edited - especially if they’re trying to make it sound fancier.

> to “people who cook” than to “professional chefs

You have a point here, there is a "context collapse" happening, when this definition is necessarily precise for professional chefs, and less so for "people who cook to eat".

However such recipe books typically claim to bring some of the professional techniques and results to the home cook, and as such are sowing confusion if they encourage "semantic drift"

https://interparestrust.org/terminology/term/context%20colla...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_change