Is your argument for why it's not misleading "but journalists and politicians repeat what academics say"? If so that's not very convincing and exactly the kind

Is your argument for why it's not misleading "but journalists and politicians repeat what academics say"? If so that's not very convincing and exactly the kind of argument I'm talking about. Headline writers are not exactly highly trusted. Anyway, I disagree that's true. I don't recall ever seeing a discussion of "price inflation" on it's own, headlines are always about RPI or CPI, i.e. where adjectives are used to narrow the range of prices being discussed. Even there, the definitions are certainly controversial with many prices that affect ordinary consumers being excluded, and hedonistic adjustment frequently being a source of surprise. It's also the kind of thing that led to catastrophic economics over the past 15 years or so because central banks kept rates very low and then near zero or even negative, printing lots of money that inflated giant bubbles in housing and then the stock market. They did this because "inflation is low", due to definitionally excluding the prices that were going up. Many people have tried to sound the alarm about this and central bankers (who are usually ex academic economists) simply ignored them. But again, really, repeating my wider point, your response is exactly the problem I'm talking about. A normal person will interpret "price inflation" as almost definitionally redundant, because inflation is a general rise in prices. There's no reason to expect anyone to interpret this as excluding wages. Same as how public health researchers define "unvaccinated" as including lots of people who have taken a vaccine, or "COVID death" in such a way as to include traffic accidents. When these people blame the reader for assuming a plain English definition, it's the sort of thing that just leads people to assume nothing academic can be trusted.