Talk:Coffee sniffers

Commonality
As far as I can tell, the term "disabled veteran" is a direct synonym for "war invalid" and vastly more common in modern speech. While it's a crude measure, searching google for the prior year shows 254k results for "disabled veteran" and 808 results for "war invalid", many of which contain content from older war documents.

Nationality
Dictionaries say "War Invalid" is chiefly British. Wikipedia says British English should be used for British topics, while US English should be used for US topics— and both are fine (as long as they're consistent) for general topics. This article is neither British nor US Centric. It does use the American spelling of license: '[...] it was to make sure people were wearing licensed wigs.' but that's not particularly persuasive.

A quick google search for "disabled veteran" "gov.uk" shows that the British government uses the term, so the change is not likely to confuse British readers.

Term of art
If "war invalid" connotes a technical distinction that "disabled veteran" doesn't, it's not obvious from context, and should probably be considered technical language.

From the style guide: "'Some topics are intrinsically technical, but editors should try to make them understandable to as many readers as possible. [...] Do not introduce new and specialized words simply to teach them to the reader when more common alternatives will do.'"

My reading of that still points to changing it.

Takeaway
Overall, the term seems arcane and lacks meaningful distinction from more common terminology. This is not my area of expertise, so I'll let this sit here a while before changing it.

Andythechef (talk) 21:08, 18 March 2022 (UTC)