When is champagne not champagne?

Saw an ad in a news magazine the other day. Seems that France is up in arms about the theft of one of its words. The word champagne, they say, refers to a region in France and is the name of the sparkling wine produced in that area. It is a legal but morally fraudulent practice to name any other sparkling beverage champagne.
What they mean is, of course, that a champagne produced in California shouldn't be labeled champagne because it isn't produced in champagne.
In this, the ad falls error to a common misconception in language use, and that is the belief that somehow any word is connected to an invisible cord that leads back to the original word. If one learns the word champagne, for instance, one learns (magically, mysteriously) that the word denotes not a general type of beverage but a specific type of beverage.
What the belief ignores is twofold: First, people learn what words mean by identifying them with what they know about the world. When I learned about champagne, I learned only that it was a sparkling alcoholic beverage. Period. It wasn't later that I learned about the area in France, and not until very much later that I learned about France's desire to keep the word French. Second, a word means what everybody thinks it means, and the meanings of words change, will we nill we. If this were not so, virtue would still mean strength.
My advice to the French would be, "Live with it. You don't have a leg to stand on."
Not that they will pay much attention to me.

Creativity in Language

There are tons of books out there telling us what is wrong with the English language and how we can fix it. Many trees have died so that we can learn the difference between shall and will (there isn't any), fewer and less (there isn't any), and who and whom (there isn't any).
All these accounts assume that language is a thing, an object. But it isn't. We have grammar books, but they aren't language. We have dictionaries, but they're not language either. Ditto linguistics texts, writing texts, thesauri. Language isn't a thing; it's a process. It's the means (which we don't understand) by which idea hops from person to person.
As such, it's versatile and creative. It diverges, converges, loops, fragments, coheres, and does almost anything but remain frozen in the form you learned from Ms. Fidditch, your 5th grade English teacher.
Consider two-word verbs, for instance. Compare "I looked over the wall," with "I looked over the document." A moment's thought will show that in the first sentence, we have subject (I), verb (looked), and a prepositional phrase (over the wall). But that won't work with the second sentence, which has a subject (I), but the verb (looked over), and a direct object (the document).
Or consider the next step. We take a two-word verb and make it into a noun. So, the two-word verb look over becomes the noun, lookover, as in, "Give this memo a lookover will you?"
Two things are amazing: That the process happens, and that we get it the first time we hear it. Can't do much better than that.