What does 'acute term' mean?

The wrapping of Christmas presents, William Waits notes, is a fairly recent phenomenon in American life. It arose at the turn of the 20th century, during a period when hand-made presents were giving way to machine-made, store-bought ones. For both givers and manufacturers, this shift presented a problem, for the machine-made items, precisely because they were convenient, represented less of the giver's personal attention than the hand-made items had done; thus they were symbolically less intimate. To disguise this loss of symbolic value, and to invest the manufactured items with a personal touch, retailers encouraged shoppers to have their purchases gift-wrapped.
Gift-wrapping, in Waits's acute term, became a 'decontaminating mechanism' that removed the presents from the 'normal flow of bought-and-sold goods' and made them, for a single ceremonial moment, emblems of intimacy rather than commerce.