What do you think?
Rate this book
The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu
Why do we eat toast for breakfast, and then toast to good health at dinner? What does the turkey we eat on Thanksgiving have to do with the country on the eastern Mediterranean? Combining history with linguistic analysis, Stanford University linguist Dan Jurafsky uncovers a global atlas of culinary influences: how a fish sauce from China became America's favorite condiment, how Martha Washington helped import the French macaron that become the coconut macaroon, and why the Chinese don't have a word for "dessert". He points out the subtle meanings hidden in word like "rich" and "crispy", zeroes in on the metaphors we rely on in restaurant reviews, and determines how much your dinner will cost by counting the words on the menu. The Language of Food will leave readers with their taste buds tempted and their intellects fully nourished.
246 pages, Paperback
First published September 8, 2014
361 people are currently reading
5487 people want to read
About the author
Dan Jurafsky
6 books83 followersDan Jurafsky is the recipient of a MacArthur "Genius Grant" and a professor of linguistics at Stanford University. He and his wife live in San Francisco.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 357 reviews
May 11, 2023
I enjoyed this book. It's very US-centric and the US is all about never losing an opportunity to sell someone something. In this case food. Sometimes it is done with onomatopoeic words like 'cracker', say it and you can feel how crisp that wafer is in your mouth. The best known example is the breakfast cereal that goes Snap, Crackle and Pop (no one mentions it goes soggy in the milk). Or what about the cheese 'bubbling' on the pizza with it's thin, crispy crust as you sip your fizzy soda?
Sometimes it is by associating food with sex. Think of the ads for chocolate, or even the fashion pics, where the model purses her lips in a kiss shape and then open them to lick an icecream cone or a strawberry. It has just as many phallic associations as the waiter in an Italian restaurant coming around with a gigantic pepper mill to spray over your food! And where would we be without the orgasmic, "Death by chocolate cake"?
Selling words can be used for methods as well. Food can be described so it sounds more upmarket than it is and can be priced higher on a menu. "Blackened salmon" says one thing, "burned on the outside salmon" or even "grilled salmon" isn't the same thing. "served with a caramel drizzle" v "sugary syrup squirted on top", "marbled steak" v "meat with a lot of fat running through it" etc.
All this calling food by seductive names has been going on a long time. In 1066, when the Normans (who were originally Norsemen) defeated the English, they brought with them French, which became the language for the upper classes. But everyone soon adopted these upscale words for food - pork, not pig, boeuf - beef - for cow, mouton - mutton - for sheep. Latterly we say 'jus' rather than gravy, and often 'cuisine' rather than cooking. A menu written in French will be presumed to be of higher class, better cooking and more expensive than a similar one in English.
It's all quite interesting and very manipulative.
Now I'm off to have a cafe latte with sable aux chocolat. White coffee with a choccie biscuit doesn't quite do it, does it?
_________________________
"All innovation happens at interstices. Great food is no exception, created at the intersection of cultures as each one modifies and enhances what is borrowed from its neighbors. The language of food is a window onto these “between” places, the ancient clash of civilizations, the modern clash of culture, the covert clues to human cognition, society, and evolution."
I love that. I hope the book lives up to this quote from the last paragraph of the introduction.
Sometimes it is by associating food with sex. Think of the ads for chocolate, or even the fashion pics, where the model purses her lips in a kiss shape and then open them to lick an icecream cone or a strawberry. It has just as many phallic associations as the waiter in an Italian restaurant coming around with a gigantic pepper mill to spray over your food! And where would we be without the orgasmic, "Death by chocolate cake"?
Selling words can be used for methods as well. Food can be described so it sounds more upmarket than it is and can be priced higher on a menu. "Blackened salmon" says one thing, "burned on the outside salmon" or even "grilled salmon" isn't the same thing. "served with a caramel drizzle" v "sugary syrup squirted on top", "marbled steak" v "meat with a lot of fat running through it" etc.
All this calling food by seductive names has been going on a long time. In 1066, when the Normans (who were originally Norsemen) defeated the English, they brought with them French, which became the language for the upper classes. But everyone soon adopted these upscale words for food - pork, not pig, boeuf - beef - for cow, mouton - mutton - for sheep. Latterly we say 'jus' rather than gravy, and often 'cuisine' rather than cooking. A menu written in French will be presumed to be of higher class, better cooking and more expensive than a similar one in English.
It's all quite interesting and very manipulative.
Now I'm off to have a cafe latte with sable aux chocolat. White coffee with a choccie biscuit doesn't quite do it, does it?
_________________________
"All innovation happens at interstices. Great food is no exception, created at the intersection of cultures as each one modifies and enhances what is borrowed from its neighbors. The language of food is a window onto these “between” places, the ancient clash of civilizations, the modern clash of culture, the covert clues to human cognition, society, and evolution."
I love that. I hope the book lives up to this quote from the last paragraph of the introduction.
March 5, 2019
good gravy. between putting this book down and losing it in my stacks to triumphantly finishing it after months and months of not knowing where it was only to have it be potentially compromised by the bedbug invasion which necessitated it be locked up in a bag for a month, it has now been over a year since i first picked this thing up and i am only now able to review it. and it's not even 200 pages long. take out the pictures and the recipes, and it's practically a magazine article.
i am the worst at reviewing.
but i really enjoyed this book, despite how long it took me to come to that conclusion. food and etymology are both inherently fascinating to me, and i still think with fondness of my undergrad etymology class and wish i'd studied it more in my academic career.
even though the book is brief, there's a ton of useful information in it. for example, i finally learned why it's called pain perdu. i mean, i knew the words meant "lost bread," but for some reason i'd never made the (incredibly obvious) connection that you make it with bread that has gone stale. i always assumed it was "lost" under the rivers of butter and syrup i poured upon it.
there's basically two different avenues explored here. one is tracing food through time and place and learning how it evolved into the food we know today, both in name and ingredients. the second focus is the one that really got my brain juices a-stirring, and it's more about food and language with an advertising slant. one of the chapters focuses on the language used in menus throughout time and a mini-study on the relationship between the language used and the average price of the restaurant's meals. so many subtle manipulations at play - the length and number of the words used, the use of french terms, the inclusion of the protein's birthplace, the occurrence of "filler words," the level of complicity the diner has in their own meal (i.e. - "your way" or "your choice.") it's fascinating stuff.
one of my assignments for library school was to research a local archive collection of my choosing and i chose the buttolph menu collection at the nypl. was i drawn to it because it had the word "butt" in it?? probably, but also because it was food-related, and i thought it would be really cool to handle old menus. the collection consists of more than 25,000 menus collected by the wonderfully eccentric miss frank e. buttolph, and it's an amazing historical resource to study both menu design, menu writing, and the gustatory delights of the past. you can see the collection in digital form here:
https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/c...
so that chapter resonated with me even more for having had that experience.
there are other chapters in this vein covering the language used in junk-food advertising, the linguistic logic behind the names of things like "crackers" and "ice cream," and how the words we use for certain kinds of foods mimic the way they feel in our mouths. (i will not say "mouthfeel." i will not say "mouthfeel.") and the most interesting (to me) chapter studies the words used in yelp reviews of restaurants, which looks at word-occurrence by gender, by type of restaurant, and by entrée vs dessert. the most revealing finding is that words with a sexual connotation: succulent, orgasmic, sumptuous, sensual, seductive - are most often applied to food at expensive restaurants while words with drug connotations: addictive, fix, "like crack", "drug of choice" - are used for inexpensive foods; for guilty pleasures that we crave even though we know they are bad for us. and also that dessert and sushi are among the foods resulting in the most sexxytime words - again describing the way they feel in the mouth. and i still won't say "mouthfeel."
it's fantastic stuff and very easy to read. there's a bit too much of the personal anecdote dropped in, and it is very san francisco-centric, but there's at least one entertaining, thought-provoking fact in each chapter, which is pretty good for a book about something as niche-y as food and linguistics.
and for all the instances of a groan-inducing pun:
The language of food helps us understand the interconnectedness of civilizations and the vast globalization that happened, not recently, as we might think, but centuries or millennia ago, all brought together by the most basic human pursuit: finding something good to eat. You might call it "EATymology."
(you might, but you mustn't.)
and the wide-eyed optimism:
I'd like to think that the lesson here is that we are all immigrants, that no culture is an island, that beauty is created at the confusing and painful boundaries between cultures and peoples and religions. I guess we can only look forward to the day when the battles we fight are about nothing more significant than where to go for tacos.
there are some unexpected, appreciated connections. i mean, how often do you think tupac turns up in linguistic tomes?
Libations are still around too. Modern hiphop culture has a libationary tradition of "pouring one out" -- tipping out malt liquor on the ground before drinking, to honor a friend or relative who has passed away - - described in songs like Tupac Shakur's "Pour Out a Little Liquor." (It's especially appropriate that malt liquor, a fortified beer made by adding sugar before fermenting, is itself another descendent of shikaru.)
it's definitely a good read for those of you who have an interest in the subject matter. you will learn about the connections and differences between macaroni, macaroons, and macarons and you will learn an awful lot about bread. and what "semantic bleaching" is. and why we use words of anglo-saxon origin for the animals we eat, like "pig," "cow," "hog," "sow," but words of french origin for the resulting meat: "veal," "beef," "pork."
language is SO COOL!
3.5 stars rounded up for the really good parts.
*******************************************
oh my god - THAT'S where this book has been all this time!! resuming reading of it... NOW!
come to my blog!
i am the worst at reviewing.
but i really enjoyed this book, despite how long it took me to come to that conclusion. food and etymology are both inherently fascinating to me, and i still think with fondness of my undergrad etymology class and wish i'd studied it more in my academic career.
even though the book is brief, there's a ton of useful information in it. for example, i finally learned why it's called pain perdu. i mean, i knew the words meant "lost bread," but for some reason i'd never made the (incredibly obvious) connection that you make it with bread that has gone stale. i always assumed it was "lost" under the rivers of butter and syrup i poured upon it.
there's basically two different avenues explored here. one is tracing food through time and place and learning how it evolved into the food we know today, both in name and ingredients. the second focus is the one that really got my brain juices a-stirring, and it's more about food and language with an advertising slant. one of the chapters focuses on the language used in menus throughout time and a mini-study on the relationship between the language used and the average price of the restaurant's meals. so many subtle manipulations at play - the length and number of the words used, the use of french terms, the inclusion of the protein's birthplace, the occurrence of "filler words," the level of complicity the diner has in their own meal (i.e. - "your way" or "your choice.") it's fascinating stuff.
one of my assignments for library school was to research a local archive collection of my choosing and i chose the buttolph menu collection at the nypl. was i drawn to it because it had the word "butt" in it?? probably, but also because it was food-related, and i thought it would be really cool to handle old menus. the collection consists of more than 25,000 menus collected by the wonderfully eccentric miss frank e. buttolph, and it's an amazing historical resource to study both menu design, menu writing, and the gustatory delights of the past. you can see the collection in digital form here:
https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/c...
so that chapter resonated with me even more for having had that experience.
there are other chapters in this vein covering the language used in junk-food advertising, the linguistic logic behind the names of things like "crackers" and "ice cream," and how the words we use for certain kinds of foods mimic the way they feel in our mouths. (i will not say "mouthfeel." i will not say "mouthfeel.") and the most interesting (to me) chapter studies the words used in yelp reviews of restaurants, which looks at word-occurrence by gender, by type of restaurant, and by entrée vs dessert. the most revealing finding is that words with a sexual connotation: succulent, orgasmic, sumptuous, sensual, seductive - are most often applied to food at expensive restaurants while words with drug connotations: addictive, fix, "like crack", "drug of choice" - are used for inexpensive foods; for guilty pleasures that we crave even though we know they are bad for us. and also that dessert and sushi are among the foods resulting in the most sexxytime words - again describing the way they feel in the mouth. and i still won't say "mouthfeel."
it's fantastic stuff and very easy to read. there's a bit too much of the personal anecdote dropped in, and it is very san francisco-centric, but there's at least one entertaining, thought-provoking fact in each chapter, which is pretty good for a book about something as niche-y as food and linguistics.
and for all the instances of a groan-inducing pun:
The language of food helps us understand the interconnectedness of civilizations and the vast globalization that happened, not recently, as we might think, but centuries or millennia ago, all brought together by the most basic human pursuit: finding something good to eat. You might call it "EATymology."
(you might, but you mustn't.)
and the wide-eyed optimism:
I'd like to think that the lesson here is that we are all immigrants, that no culture is an island, that beauty is created at the confusing and painful boundaries between cultures and peoples and religions. I guess we can only look forward to the day when the battles we fight are about nothing more significant than where to go for tacos.
there are some unexpected, appreciated connections. i mean, how often do you think tupac turns up in linguistic tomes?
Libations are still around too. Modern hiphop culture has a libationary tradition of "pouring one out" -- tipping out malt liquor on the ground before drinking, to honor a friend or relative who has passed away - - described in songs like Tupac Shakur's "Pour Out a Little Liquor." (It's especially appropriate that malt liquor, a fortified beer made by adding sugar before fermenting, is itself another descendent of shikaru.)
it's definitely a good read for those of you who have an interest in the subject matter. you will learn about the connections and differences between macaroni, macaroons, and macarons and you will learn an awful lot about bread. and what "semantic bleaching" is. and why we use words of anglo-saxon origin for the animals we eat, like "pig," "cow," "hog," "sow," but words of french origin for the resulting meat: "veal," "beef," "pork."
language is SO COOL!
3.5 stars rounded up for the really good parts.
*******************************************
oh my god - THAT'S where this book has been all this time!! resuming reading of it... NOW!
come to my blog!
June 6, 2015
2.5 an interesting though unevenly written look at the history of some of our foods. Also how a look at a menu can determine the price of the food charged in a restaurant. Some parts were fascinating, some parts were not. A good skimming book.
June 23, 2022
Very Eurocentric (and America-centric) but otherwise an interesting read.
December 6, 2021
This is an interesting book on food, language and history; story of culinary influence that can go around the globe, with change into a recipe and such possibly happening along the way. There is also some interesting facts of history and word origins, plus some recipes that one might want to try. The author got interesting in writing this book over a question about the origins of ketchup, which is one of the subjects in one of the chapters here.
There was so many facts in the chapters that I wanted to tell others after reading the book. Each chapter has something interesting to learn about, but particularly toward the end you get to the linguistic things more closer. The author uses his home city, San Francisco, often as a starting point, and his wife Janet is also mentioned here and there.
Now I just talk about the chapters:
What menus can tell about the place (expensive, middle-range, and cheap(ish)) through words (fe. food origin mention, fancy words, size mentions, amount of adjectives).
If the word ‘entree’ means appetizer or a main course (first time mentioned in 1555).
How the sikbaj of Persia (sweet-n-sour stewed beef with sweet vinegar in it) became a fish dish like ceviche, fish & chips, tempura, escabeche, aspic – sailors’ help c.10th century; the influence of fish-during-Lent, the conquest of Peru, Portuguese Jesuits in Japan, of Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews in Britain.
Origins of ketchup (originally a Fujianese word for fish sauce) – influence on certain kind of sushi; also origins of arrack (the sailor drink of choice before rum), Bengal origins of Worcestershire sauce.
Toasting with drinks and why to health – putting toast in wine or ale (in Middle Ages); soap first came with toast in it; origins of wine (and the word too); on libations (thus hip-hops “pour one out” to the deceased) and cider (from the name for Akkadian honeyed beer).
How turkey the bird got its name – the Portuguese merchants were a bit too secretive. Mixed with guinea fowl at first. That there is more than one kind of mole (chocolate one mentioned in 1817 first); what really was eaten on ‘Thanksgiving’ moment (deer) and where then pumpkin and pecan appeared from (Europe and the word from Illinois language).
Food place review language (English one) – words used in good and bad reviews (a bit of a connection to the menu chapter IMO). Negative ones need more words, use smell words, we/us, and stories. Positive ones (more common than neg.) use sex, addiction/drugs (esp. if cheaper, less healthy foods), mention dessert.
The language of potato chips packages (in America at least) – depends a little on which class of people they are trying to sell it to, and the price of the package. Similar to menu thing.
Bread and salt – where the lord and lady come from (loaf-keeper/kneader, Anglo-Saxon); same root for flour/flower; french toast; yep, the Swedish word for a flour bun comes through German and ultimately from semolina, which comes from Akkadian ‘samidu’. Salt: salad, sauce, slaw, salsa, salami. Coleslaw origins.
Macaroon and macaroni – talk of marizapan; lasagne’s Greek origins; macaroon’s roots in the end in Aramaic-speaking culture; dried noodles from Middle East to Sicily (where the word ‘maccarruni’ comes from, and at first meaning both the fluffier marzipan dish and a type of gnocchi); Emily Dickinson’s coconut cake recipe; and the macaroni hipsters.
Ice creams, marmalade, sherbet, sorbet, and lemonade – ice cream’s original flavor (orange blossom); marmalade first flavor (quince); ways of freezing the ice better…
And finally two list-y type of chapters
The importance of what a word sounds like when it comes to naming foods, especially important with vowels – light front letters (for fe. Crackers), friendlier (no wonder we say ‘cheese’ for photographs and use a smile)/smaller, in children’s voices + heavy back letters (for fe. ice cream), more aggressive/bigger, full. And also continuants: spiky vs. curvy.
And finally, to desserts – took a while in Middle Ages Europe to find it’s final place on the menu (and many dishes were then sweet-and-sour also). The cuisine grammar bit was interesting: in each cuisine, a certain meal order, flavors using certain elements for sweet/sour/salt/umami, and certain combination and cooking techniques (cooked vs. raw), and what changes have happened due to certain cuisine rules for certain imported foods in history, which one might find examples of in earlier chapters.
I think this is a very interesting book, especially if one likes linguistics, history, word etymology and food. Light enough, but inspiring, and might make you want to go try or make some foods. Some personal bits are a good way to start each chapter or put somewhere within them, but never too much, leaving more room for the stories. Very enjoyable.
There was so many facts in the chapters that I wanted to tell others after reading the book. Each chapter has something interesting to learn about, but particularly toward the end you get to the linguistic things more closer. The author uses his home city, San Francisco, often as a starting point, and his wife Janet is also mentioned here and there.
Now I just talk about the chapters:
What menus can tell about the place (expensive, middle-range, and cheap(ish)) through words (fe. food origin mention, fancy words, size mentions, amount of adjectives).
If the word ‘entree’ means appetizer or a main course (first time mentioned in 1555).
How the sikbaj of Persia (sweet-n-sour stewed beef with sweet vinegar in it) became a fish dish like ceviche, fish & chips, tempura, escabeche, aspic – sailors’ help c.10th century; the influence of fish-during-Lent, the conquest of Peru, Portuguese Jesuits in Japan, of Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews in Britain.
Origins of ketchup (originally a Fujianese word for fish sauce) – influence on certain kind of sushi; also origins of arrack (the sailor drink of choice before rum), Bengal origins of Worcestershire sauce.
Toasting with drinks and why to health – putting toast in wine or ale (in Middle Ages); soap first came with toast in it; origins of wine (and the word too); on libations (thus hip-hops “pour one out” to the deceased) and cider (from the name for Akkadian honeyed beer).
How turkey the bird got its name – the Portuguese merchants were a bit too secretive. Mixed with guinea fowl at first. That there is more than one kind of mole (chocolate one mentioned in 1817 first); what really was eaten on ‘Thanksgiving’ moment (deer) and where then pumpkin and pecan appeared from (Europe and the word from Illinois language).
Food place review language (English one) – words used in good and bad reviews (a bit of a connection to the menu chapter IMO). Negative ones need more words, use smell words, we/us, and stories. Positive ones (more common than neg.) use sex, addiction/drugs (esp. if cheaper, less healthy foods), mention dessert.
The language of potato chips packages (in America at least) – depends a little on which class of people they are trying to sell it to, and the price of the package. Similar to menu thing.
Bread and salt – where the lord and lady come from (loaf-keeper/kneader, Anglo-Saxon); same root for flour/flower; french toast; yep, the Swedish word for a flour bun comes through German and ultimately from semolina, which comes from Akkadian ‘samidu’. Salt: salad, sauce, slaw, salsa, salami. Coleslaw origins.
Macaroon and macaroni – talk of marizapan; lasagne’s Greek origins; macaroon’s roots in the end in Aramaic-speaking culture; dried noodles from Middle East to Sicily (where the word ‘maccarruni’ comes from, and at first meaning both the fluffier marzipan dish and a type of gnocchi); Emily Dickinson’s coconut cake recipe; and the macaroni hipsters.
Ice creams, marmalade, sherbet, sorbet, and lemonade – ice cream’s original flavor (orange blossom); marmalade first flavor (quince); ways of freezing the ice better…
And finally two list-y type of chapters
The importance of what a word sounds like when it comes to naming foods, especially important with vowels – light front letters (for fe. Crackers), friendlier (no wonder we say ‘cheese’ for photographs and use a smile)/smaller, in children’s voices + heavy back letters (for fe. ice cream), more aggressive/bigger, full. And also continuants: spiky vs. curvy.
And finally, to desserts – took a while in Middle Ages Europe to find it’s final place on the menu (and many dishes were then sweet-and-sour also). The cuisine grammar bit was interesting: in each cuisine, a certain meal order, flavors using certain elements for sweet/sour/salt/umami, and certain combination and cooking techniques (cooked vs. raw), and what changes have happened due to certain cuisine rules for certain imported foods in history, which one might find examples of in earlier chapters.
I think this is a very interesting book, especially if one likes linguistics, history, word etymology and food. Light enough, but inspiring, and might make you want to go try or make some foods. Some personal bits are a good way to start each chapter or put somewhere within them, but never too much, leaving more room for the stories. Very enjoyable.
November 2, 2014
Good bus book. Not as deep as I was expecting from the NPR stories.
I suspect there’s a deeper book on the cutting room floor. On the penultimate page of the main text there’s a great paragraph about the “implicit cultural norms” embedded in food and an assertion “that a cuisine is a richly structured cultural object, with its component flavor elements and its set of combinatory grammatical principles, learned early and deeply.” (184). Our author wraps up by musing that the bacon fad comes from breaking the American culinary grammatical rule that savory is savory and sweet is sweet. But aside from alluding to the fact that different cultures structure meals different ways and different cultures have different attitudes towards The Raw And The Cooked (which is alluded to, but not in a deep way), there’s not a lot of insight into how those richly structured cultural objects play.
Good bus book. Definitely an appetizer, not an entrée.
I suspect there’s a deeper book on the cutting room floor. On the penultimate page of the main text there’s a great paragraph about the “implicit cultural norms” embedded in food and an assertion “that a cuisine is a richly structured cultural object, with its component flavor elements and its set of combinatory grammatical principles, learned early and deeply.” (184). Our author wraps up by musing that the bacon fad comes from breaking the American culinary grammatical rule that savory is savory and sweet is sweet. But aside from alluding to the fact that different cultures structure meals different ways and different cultures have different attitudes towards The Raw And The Cooked (which is alluded to, but not in a deep way), there’s not a lot of insight into how those richly structured cultural objects play.
Good bus book. Definitely an appetizer, not an entrée.
March 19, 2017
We get it, dude. You live in San Francisco.
August 7, 2016
A more accurate title would be "The Language of A Bunch of Six-Hundred-Year-Old Recipes for 28 Gallons of Vinegar-Meat Stew".
I learned a few new words and fun tidbits, but by and large, it was just a guy talking about how great California is for the first quarter of the chapter, then slapping up a recipe for a gross and/or uncookable food, then explaining the (chiefly Arabic) origins of the word.
Ketchup comes from China. The word, too. Looks German, doesn't it? Used to be a fish sauce. England started putting tomatoes in it sometime in the 1800s. Weird.
It was okay, but didn't really deliver. C'est la vie.
I learned a few new words and fun tidbits, but by and large, it was just a guy talking about how great California is for the first quarter of the chapter, then slapping up a recipe for a gross and/or uncookable food, then explaining the (chiefly Arabic) origins of the word.
Ketchup comes from China. The word, too. Looks German, doesn't it? Used to be a fish sauce. England started putting tomatoes in it sometime in the 1800s. Weird.
It was okay, but didn't really deliver. C'est la vie.
September 22, 2014
Initially, I gave this 4 stars, on the grounds of the subject matter, trying to ignore the atrocious writing. Alas, it's so bad it overshadows the good parts. And there are good parts. Whenever Jurafsky addresses his own research, things are fine--even if I don't think he quite understands how a regression analysis works. The writing, though. So bad. There's misspelling the name of your hometown (p. 66). There's ridiculous turns of phrase, like "it was here that the main industrial production occurred (p. 57)." Since when does production just "occur?" There's Janet, who is mentioned (p. 50) because her father grew up in China. It turns out later that Janet is the author's wife, but that still doesn't explain why we need to know this. In fact, it would've been nice if the author could have stuck to a writing style. The informal and personal is not one that he can pull off--he over-explains "jokes" so maybe leave that to those who have the gift of words. But by far the worst, and the reason this book shall never be seen by my students, even though I teach a course on food, and the subject is fascinating, is what "occurs" on p. 14. "[...] we then studied the additional affect of individual words on the prices. " Unforgivable.
June 9, 2020
"The linguistic and culinary habits of our own tribe or nation are not the habits of all tribes and nations. Yet all languages and cultures share a deep commonality, the social and cognitive traits that make us human. These facets - respects for our differences, and faith in our shared humanity- are the ingredients in the recipe for compassion. "
October 18, 2014
In thirteen (a baker’s dozen) readable chapters, Stanford linguist Dan Jurafsky shows what happens when linguists study the language of food. Combining etymological research and contemporary linguistic theory, the book offers a readable history of such staples as ketchup, turkey, salad, sushi, macaroni, sherbet, and even broader concepts like entrée and dessert. His well-researched vignettes provide something for readers to chew over, while the computational insights are surprise ingredients. We learn about the etymological relationship between salad, salsa, slaw, sauce and salami, for example, and between macaroons, macarons, and macaroni (and how the famous line from “Yankee Doodle Dandy” came about).
Beyond the etymological, we gain the insights phonetics and computational linguistics have to offer to the language of food and food marketing. Chapter 12 explains the sound symbolism of front and back vowels—why some foods sound thin (Triscuits) and others richly rotund (Rocky Road). In chapter 8 We learn about the descriptions of potato chip bags of various prices and, in chapter 1 (drawing on a data base of 6,500 menus), how expensive, moderate and inexpensive restaurants use language to shape our tastes: sides cost less than accompaniments, French more than English, and longer adjectives more than shorter ones. Point of view is important too: if you get the chef’s choice it’s likely to cost more than having it your way.
The book is salted (but not peppered) with historical and contemporary recipes, including Emily Dickinson’s recipe for coconut cake. Jurafsky ends with the evolution of dessert (naturally) and suggests a “grammar of cuisine” which might describe what counts as a meal in various cultures and eras. Together with earlier efforts such as Adrienne Lehrer’s book Wine and Conversation and the recent collection Culinary Linguistics, the grammar of cuisine is well into the main course.
Beyond the etymological, we gain the insights phonetics and computational linguistics have to offer to the language of food and food marketing. Chapter 12 explains the sound symbolism of front and back vowels—why some foods sound thin (Triscuits) and others richly rotund (Rocky Road). In chapter 8 We learn about the descriptions of potato chip bags of various prices and, in chapter 1 (drawing on a data base of 6,500 menus), how expensive, moderate and inexpensive restaurants use language to shape our tastes: sides cost less than accompaniments, French more than English, and longer adjectives more than shorter ones. Point of view is important too: if you get the chef’s choice it’s likely to cost more than having it your way.
The book is salted (but not peppered) with historical and contemporary recipes, including Emily Dickinson’s recipe for coconut cake. Jurafsky ends with the evolution of dessert (naturally) and suggests a “grammar of cuisine” which might describe what counts as a meal in various cultures and eras. Together with earlier efforts such as Adrienne Lehrer’s book Wine and Conversation and the recent collection Culinary Linguistics, the grammar of cuisine is well into the main course.
November 2, 2022
Interesting book that delves into the language of food, particularly around the different courses of a meal and the evolution of different types of food, such as the meaning of "giving a toast", ice cream, and ketchup. There was sort of a weird amount of the author within the book, things like frequent place dropping about the places he's specifically lived in a way that felt like it hampered rather than helped the overall narrative. Fairly western-centric, though he certainly does touch upon other cultures, mostly by way of their influence on modern western cuisine, and I do think to try and be more comprehensive would have been a very different book. Overall I found it interesting and walked away with several interesting facts.
June 22, 2016
Interesting but even book that would be better as a magazine long-read. Why do menus or TV ads always use buzzwords to make foods sound better (juicy cuts of steak, fresh vegetables, locally-sourced products, etc.)? What's the origins of ketchup? Why do we propose a toast?
Author Jurafsky proposes to take the reader though the origins and histories of foods. Some of it is quite interesting (the origins of ketchup for example) or looking at how someone could/should look at a menu for the quality or expense of the eatery. However, a lot of it really isn't.
There isn't a lot here that really couldn't have been condensed into a magazine long-read. And it could have been edited much better. As noted elsewhere, "San Francisco" is misspelled (with another "s" vs. a "c" in the middle). His wife Janet is mentioned but it's not clear who she is at the first mention and seems like a rando name dropped into the text. The writing seems disjointed and while some of the information is really interesting (the origins of ketchup) the writing really isn't very good. It almost feels like more than one hand wrote this and everything was combined together in a sloppy effort to make a coherent narrative.
Some of the information (such as the menu tricks) can also be found elsewhere. The idea overall was a good one but Jurafsky definitely didn't quite get there. I bought this as a bargain book but I'd recommend you get this at the library if you're really interested. It's not a keeper and is more of a book to skim than a good source to keep on hand.
Author Jurafsky proposes to take the reader though the origins and histories of foods. Some of it is quite interesting (the origins of ketchup for example) or looking at how someone could/should look at a menu for the quality or expense of the eatery. However, a lot of it really isn't.
There isn't a lot here that really couldn't have been condensed into a magazine long-read. And it could have been edited much better. As noted elsewhere, "San Francisco" is misspelled (with another "s" vs. a "c" in the middle). His wife Janet is mentioned but it's not clear who she is at the first mention and seems like a rando name dropped into the text. The writing seems disjointed and while some of the information is really interesting (the origins of ketchup) the writing really isn't very good. It almost feels like more than one hand wrote this and everything was combined together in a sloppy effort to make a coherent narrative.
Some of the information (such as the menu tricks) can also be found elsewhere. The idea overall was a good one but Jurafsky definitely didn't quite get there. I bought this as a bargain book but I'd recommend you get this at the library if you're really interested. It's not a keeper and is more of a book to skim than a good source to keep on hand.
October 10, 2018
A book about words and food what's better than this!
FOR EXAMPLE:
"As part of this French invasion, sometime in the thirteenth century, a word spelled variously flure, floure, flower, flour, or flowre first appeared in English, borrowed from the French word fleur, meaning “the blossom of a plant,” and by extension, “the best, most desirable, or choicest part of something.” [...] “Flower of wheat,” ... meant the very fine white flour created by repeatedly sifting the wheat through a fine-meshed cloth. Each pass removed more of the bran or germ, leaving a finer and whiter flour."
This is the best fact that I've learned maybe all week??
I spent 10-20 minutes trying to explain how cool it was to my manager and he nodded and said "Good for you" and kept telling me about New York Times news alerts so I guess it is probably not for everyone but as I said, A book about words and food! What's better than this!
Also I don't know anything about linguistics except for every few days googling "[word] etymology" so it was great that Jurafsky introduced linguistic theories/terms/foundations in digestible (!!!!!) ways throughout. I don't think it is intended to be a robust academic review of every linguistic study and maybe that will make some people angry. But I am also not looking for a robust academic review, I just want to read about words and food (sorry)
FOR EXAMPLE:
"As part of this French invasion, sometime in the thirteenth century, a word spelled variously flure, floure, flower, flour, or flowre first appeared in English, borrowed from the French word fleur, meaning “the blossom of a plant,” and by extension, “the best, most desirable, or choicest part of something.” [...] “Flower of wheat,” ... meant the very fine white flour created by repeatedly sifting the wheat through a fine-meshed cloth. Each pass removed more of the bran or germ, leaving a finer and whiter flour."
This is the best fact that I've learned maybe all week??
I spent 10-20 minutes trying to explain how cool it was to my manager and he nodded and said "Good for you" and kept telling me about New York Times news alerts so I guess it is probably not for everyone but as I said, A book about words and food! What's better than this!
Also I don't know anything about linguistics except for every few days googling "[word] etymology" so it was great that Jurafsky introduced linguistic theories/terms/foundations in digestible (!!!!!) ways throughout. I don't think it is intended to be a robust academic review of every linguistic study and maybe that will make some people angry. But I am also not looking for a robust academic review, I just want to read about words and food (sorry)
May 21, 2016
My daughter-in-law combines her professional knowledge of medicine with her academic knowledge of classic literature to produce her sagacious and erudite self. But her greatest savvy is the ability to choose books to give to her father-in-law which he is highly likely to enjoy. Dan Jurafsky's "The Language of Food" is a double delight: a feast for word nerds and a feast for foodies. Jurafsky is a linguistic anthropologist, interested in the secrets contained in the ever-evolving language used to describe food. The text is academic, interesting, well-written and light-hearted. This is a good book to read with Steven Gilbar's "Chicken A La King And The Buffalo Wing, Food Names And The People And Places That Inspired Them" (Cincinnati, Ohio: Writers Digest Books, 2008) and Martha Barnette, Ladyfingers & Nun's Tummies: A Lighthearted Look at How Foods Got Their Names (New York: Crown, 1997).
February 21, 2016
I liked the book - there was a lot of interesting content about the history of food and language. However the style was sometimes a bit weird - could have done without the personal tidbits throughout.
November 11, 2023
又是一本讀第一章的時候就覺得我一定要給五星的書，完全戳到我的好球區。
本書作者Dan Jurafsky是斯坦福大學的語言學與計算機科學教授，他在本書提供的語言學觀點相當吸引人，同時歷史溯源的部分也充滿著深度。十三個章節分別各有主題，令人驚喜的是其中提及粵港區域飲食文化的部分不少（——顯然因為作者愛���的出身），因此讀來倍感有趣。書籍中涉及相當多的實驗以及考據部分，不僅只討論美食的歷史也討論不同時期社會對飲食的觀點，甚至與飲食相關的廣告學和大眾心理學等內容也穿插其中。而在論述中援引到我其他鐘愛作者（如先前推薦過的扶霞），更是令人頗為驚喜。
本書作者Dan Jurafsky是斯坦福大學的語言學與計算機科學教授，他在本書提供的語言學觀點相當吸引人，同時歷史溯源的部分也充滿著深度。十三個章節分別各有主題，令人驚喜的是其中提及粵港區域飲食文化的部分不少（——顯然因為作者愛���的出身），因此讀來倍感有趣。書籍中涉及相當多的實驗以及考據部分，不僅只討論美食的歷史也討論不同時期社會對飲食的觀點，甚至與飲食相關的廣告學和大眾心理學等內容也穿插其中。而在論述中援引到我其他鐘愛作者（如先前推薦過的扶霞），更是令人頗為驚喜。
January 28, 2018
Available as a 6+ hour audio download.
I teach English. I listen to books like this as a kind of professional development that you can do on a bicycle, city bus, etc., because you never know what kind of language-related trivia may come in useful in the classroom.
For example (if I remember correctly), study of a large data set shows that a one-letter increase in median word length in the description of menu items correlates with a 19 cent increase in price. On the other hand, the average number of words used on menu descriptions, when compared with price, shows a normal-curve (i.e., inverted “U” shape) distribution, that is, both the cheapest and most expensive restaurant use very few words compared to the mid-range restaurants (wordy culprits are identified as TGI Fridays and Olive Garden, among others).
Trivia that I listened to but did not retain involved the long journeys of the words “ketchup” and “turkey” into English.
I thought this book could also be profitably listened to by ad copywriters (if such a profession still exists) and people who are in the business of thinking up catchy name for edible products.
However, I cannot really recommend this to the great number of people who are not in these lines of work.
As mentioned in other reviews, the book is very San Francisco-centric. References to local restaurants and geography run rampant. Those of us who have never (to our regret and sorrow) even visited the Bay Area are at a serious disadvantage.
Finally, the electronic and/or print editions of this book may come with an accompanying .pdf file, which is referred to repeatedly in the audio version even though, as far as I can tell, no such file is available to audio book listeners. The book can be understood and enjoyed without the .pdf file, but I thought that, if no such file is available, perhaps the reader or the producer of the audio version could have removed references to them.
I teach English. I listen to books like this as a kind of professional development that you can do on a bicycle, city bus, etc., because you never know what kind of language-related trivia may come in useful in the classroom.
For example (if I remember correctly), study of a large data set shows that a one-letter increase in median word length in the description of menu items correlates with a 19 cent increase in price. On the other hand, the average number of words used on menu descriptions, when compared with price, shows a normal-curve (i.e., inverted “U” shape) distribution, that is, both the cheapest and most expensive restaurant use very few words compared to the mid-range restaurants (wordy culprits are identified as TGI Fridays and Olive Garden, among others).
Trivia that I listened to but did not retain involved the long journeys of the words “ketchup” and “turkey” into English.
I thought this book could also be profitably listened to by ad copywriters (if such a profession still exists) and people who are in the business of thinking up catchy name for edible products.
However, I cannot really recommend this to the great number of people who are not in these lines of work.
As mentioned in other reviews, the book is very San Francisco-centric. References to local restaurants and geography run rampant. Those of us who have never (to our regret and sorrow) even visited the Bay Area are at a serious disadvantage.
Finally, the electronic and/or print editions of this book may come with an accompanying .pdf file, which is referred to repeatedly in the audio version even though, as far as I can tell, no such file is available to audio book listeners. The book can be understood and enjoyed without the .pdf file, but I thought that, if no such file is available, perhaps the reader or the producer of the audio version could have removed references to them.
November 17, 2016
This was an enjoyable, quick read. Jurafsky has a breezy and engaging writing style. The biggest takeaway from the book is that our food cultures, like our languages, borrow from one another and that the etymologies of familiar words like syrup and ketchup, and the culinary history they encapsulate, demonstrate the centrality of Muslim and Chinese empires to the longue durée of globalization. Jurafsky's chapters cover a range of topics--from the class-coding of restaurant menus to the grammar of a meal--and they are uniformly insightful and sometimes even surprising (like the linguistic theory about why thin, brittle foods are described with crisp consonants and front vowels across multiple languages). I also like that Jurafsky punctuates these investigations with personal anecdotes about his Jewish family and his wife's Chinese traditions and with warm reflections on his beloved city, San Francisco. Like a New Yorker profile writer, Jurafsky recognizes which details will provide a hook to draw the reader in. For example, he starts a chapter with a reminiscence about the pleasures of July in San Francisco, fireworks and ice cream, and then he turns to their shared origins in the chemical effects of saltpeter (explosive in fireworks and freezing in ice cream makers).
May 27, 2019
I first became aware of this book reading an Italian weekly magazine. Which is weird since it hasn't been translated into Italian yet. Anyway, it tickled my curiosity and I bought it. After three years I finally read it.
First of all, I have a feeling this book will be way more appreciate by people living in Los Angeles. There are tons of references to places in the city. It gives authenticity but it makes it a little obscure for those who've never been to L.A. On the contrary, I didn't mind all the personal references.
It was interesting. It made me realize a lot of things. I mean, they've always been there but I've never perceived them before. Of course, some things make sense only in English (the longer the words, the pricier the object will be), but some of them are applicable in Italian as well. Why a sauce, for exemple, should be real, for instance. I mean, I really hope the tomato sauce the restaurant is using is real. If it needs to write it down, it makes me wonder.
I also like the chapter how the Chinese dessert but the whole book was good. Maybe the author did wander here and there to convey a message but it was a good read.
Or maybe I'm just in the mood for some non-fiction.
First of all, I have a feeling this book will be way more appreciate by people living in Los Angeles. There are tons of references to places in the city. It gives authenticity but it makes it a little obscure for those who've never been to L.A. On the contrary, I didn't mind all the personal references.
It was interesting. It made me realize a lot of things. I mean, they've always been there but I've never perceived them before. Of course, some things make sense only in English (the longer the words, the pricier the object will be), but some of them are applicable in Italian as well. Why a sauce, for exemple, should be real, for instance. I mean, I really hope the tomato sauce the restaurant is using is real. If it needs to write it down, it makes me wonder.
I also like the chapter how the Chinese dessert but the whole book was good. Maybe the author did wander here and there to convey a message but it was a good read.
Or maybe I'm just in the mood for some non-fiction.
August 28, 2015
In a medium bowl, mix equal parts of research, recipes, fun facts, and story telling. Recipe yields plenty of entertainment and information about why we eat what we eat, how foods traveled from culture to culture, and how food vocabulary affects our appetites.
The author's brief bio on the back flap explains the focus of this book. "Dan Jurafsky is a professor of linguistics and computer science at Stanford University. One of the foremost computational linguists in the world, he is the recipient of a 2002 MacArthur Fellowship and is known for his research applying linguistics to food studies, psychology, sociology, engineering, and many other fields." Indeed, this study is supported by extensive notes and references.
Yes, I enjoyed the book, but it's not for everyone. The history, sociology, and etymology are extensive and, at times, tedious.
The author's brief bio on the back flap explains the focus of this book. "Dan Jurafsky is a professor of linguistics and computer science at Stanford University. One of the foremost computational linguists in the world, he is the recipient of a 2002 MacArthur Fellowship and is known for his research applying linguistics to food studies, psychology, sociology, engineering, and many other fields." Indeed, this study is supported by extensive notes and references.
Yes, I enjoyed the book, but it's not for everyone. The history, sociology, and etymology are extensive and, at times, tedious.
April 16, 2023
I have always been fascinated by the linguistics of food.
I realize this may sound like an odd statement to make, because it is an incredibly niche topic, but I spent a long, long time studying theoretical linguistics. And of all the courses I took, of everything I learned, one of the things I still remember is the first day of the Introduction To Historical Linguistics class I took as an undergraduate. It was a big class, maybe fifty of us, and the professor asked us to come up with the word for "tea" in as many languages as we could. And because this was a room of fifty linguistics majors, we knew a whole lot of languages, as an aggregate. And as we called out words she wrote them all down on the board, sorting them into one of two groups, by whether they sounded more like "tea" or whether they sounded more like "chai."
Now, you probably know where this party trick is going, but at the time I didn't know: the words that sound more like "tea" are from Min te and the words that sound like "chai" are from Cantonese cha. Different countries traded with two different groups of people who each had their own word for the stuff, and they borrowed the word of the people they got tea from, and then more languages borrowed the word from those languages, and so on and so forth. Twenty years later, this class exercise still sticks with me.
So I was really excited to find this book, The Language of Food, by Dan Jurafsky, of Jurafsky & Martin fame; if you ever learned anything about NLP you have probably read his textbook. I came across this book in a great article about cultural preferences for what foods should accompany other foods recast as a kind of "food grammar," and I thought that was interesting enough for me to pick up the book.
I almost didn't buy this book, because I was put off by a lot of the negative reviews calling this book dry and calling his language usage infelicitous. These reviews seem to take as the ultimate put-down of a linguist, because I guess a linguist should know how to make sentences pretty. I regret to inform everyone who thinks that linguists automatically have some advantage at producing beautiful prose that the answer is definitely no there. (Yes, reading my first linguistics journal articles was a disappointment to me too.) By the standards of linguistics articles, this is pretty readable. I feel like I have to say this whenever I review any pop-linguistics book. Linguistics writing gets a whole lot uglier than this, people. So if you have some familiarity with scholarly linguistics, I'm pretty sure nothing about the diction here is going to bug you.
I will concede the point about the typos -- because, yeah, there are definitely a few misspellings someone should have caught. I think the most unfortunate typos were the ones in the French because now I'm wondering whether the Middle French had typos and I will never know, because do you even know what Middle French looks like? Yeah.
(Incidentally, do ebooks not support macrons? Every single macroned letter in this book is a graphic of a macron and not a typed character.)
There are a lot of pop-linguistics books that I think make great introductions to various elements of linguistics for laypeople; I really liked Anthony Burgess' (yes, that Anthony Burgess) A Mouthful of Air. (And then there's pop-linguistics books you should stay away from, like that one book by Bill Bryson.) There are also pop-linguistics books that try to split their focus between Things Linguists Will Care About and Things Normal People Will Care About and don't do a great job of it. For example, I really wanted to like Daniel Everett's Don't Sleep There Are Snakes but it didn't go into quite enough detail about Pirahã to be satisfying on the linguistics front but at the same time I cannot imagine what anyone who wasn't a linguist got out of, say, the chapter that was a blistering takedown of UG based on the data that Pirahã has no recursion. (But, hey, if you do know what that means, you know you're in for a wild ride. But if you do know what that means, you've probably also read some of the scholarly work on Pirahã.)
And then there's this book, which is neither of the above. As far as I can tell, this is book sprinkled with just enough Basic Etymology Facts about various words for food that someone who might enjoy a book about food words will unwittingly pick it up. The rest of this book is doing an extremely bad job pretending to be a pop-linguistics book, because what this book actually is is a whole bunch of corpus linguistics, using corpora that consist of things like restaurant menus, restaurant reviews, and food advertising copy. Awesome! There's also a lot of very thorough discussion of the origins of particular foods with a style of argumentation that will look really familiar if you've ever read (or written) the kind of linguistics paper where you bring every counterexample you can find and lay them all out.
(The fact that it was by Dan Jurafsky made a lot more sense when I figured that bit out. Because of course he's doing corpus work. Before I started reading it I was just like, well, I guess everyone likes food.)
You too can find out how many cents every extra letter in a word in a menu description adds to the price! Thrill at the differing emphasis on "choice" at cheap versus expensive restaurants! Learn how Gricean maxims explain the use (or lack of use) of terms such as "delicious" and "real mashed potatoes! (If you know what Gricean maxims are, you have probably worked that out yourself, you pragmatist, you.) Marvel at the corpus work on positive and negative attitudes in restaurant reviews, including the discussion of how negative reviews share many elements with trauma narratives. (I was not expecting that. It was great.)
My only objection is the chapter that had, as its big reveal, the idea that we associate nonce words with front vowels with small, light things and nonce words with back vowels with large, heavy things -- specifically, the explanation that small creatures make higher-pitched sounds and that larger creatures make lower-pitched sounds. I haven't read any of the work on this, so it's possible that the actual paper by Ohala addresses this, but: Jurafsky begins this explanation by characterizing the difference between front and back vowels as differing in the location in your mouth where your tongue is placed. Which, I guess, is incidentally true.
But if you know anything about acoustic phonetics, you know that even though tongue height and backness are the traditional idea behind how vowels are arranged on a vowel chart, what we are actually mapping is the relationship between their first formant (F1) which is height, and their second formant (F2), which is backness. Jurafsky then, as far as I can tell, conflates this with pitch (F0, fundamental frequency), which is neither of the above things, and says that front vowels have higher pitches (uh? as far as I know, high vowels are the ones with higher intrinsic pitches) and specifically higher-pitched second formants (F2) than back vowels. For those of you playing along at home, the literal difference between front and back vowels is their F2. So he's just said that front vowels are associated with small things because they have a higher F2 and back vowels are associated with large things because they have a lower F2. Congratulations, this is the actual acoustic definition of vowel backness. Front vowels are associated with small things because they are front vowels. Good to know.
Jurafsky then attempts to say that this is the exact same claim as saying that smaller animals produce sounds with a higher F0 (pitch) than larger animals which have a lower F0. And, yes, that is an assertion that looks pretty obviously right if you've ever heard, say, a Pomeranian and a Samoyed barking -- but it is also not the same assertion as the claim about F2. Because F0 is not F2. Is it true that a higher F0 also raises the frequency of the other formants? Yes, that is true -- it's not a 1:1 correlation, but it's there. (The data I am finding says that Peterson and Barney (1952) say that women have a F0 1.7 times higher than men but their formants are only 1.15 times higher.) And obviously we can perceive F2 because that's how we identify front vs. back vowels, but that's not F0. Saying F0 and F2 were the same thing would be like saying that identifying vowels is dependent on pitch, and in most vocal ranges that isn't the case, as far as I know.
(It's possible for speakers with a very high F0 to have a F0 higher than where their own F1 ought to be on some vowels, which can lead to problems with vowel identification. IIRC, classically-trained sopranos can also get F0 higher than even where some of their own F2s are expected; I am informed that they also are trained essentially to be able to consciously manipulate where their formants occur.)
So, yes, what he's saying is true, but as far as I can tell, the explanation has been simplified down to the point where it's hanging off an assertion that F0 and F2 are the same, which is not actually true. They are correlated, but they are not measuring the same thing at all. You know that meme that's like "I don't understand how, but you used the wrong formula and got the right answer?" That's what reading this chapter felt like.
What's more, this doesn't explain why all the front vowels in his nonce words were high front vowels but the height of the back vowels varied from [u] all the way down to [a]. Where do low front vowels go? Why aren't they here? Is [æ] not associated with small things? Is it because the vowel space gets smaller at the bottom and that the difference in F2 between low front and low back vowels is not as pronounced as when the vowels are higher? I mean, yeah, probably, that's my guess. I just thought it was a weird thing that didn't get brought up at all here. Probably that means I should go read Ohala's paper.
Anyway, other than that, it was a great book. I nitpick because I love.
Honestly, I feel like this is a five-star book for anyone who thinks the phrase "corpus linguistics on restaurant menus" sounds like a good time, and if that's you I hope you're already buying this because you're gonna love it. I have no idea what the hell the rest of you are going to get out of this, which is probably why the ratings of this book are so varied, because the answer for a lot of people is clearly "not much." And that probably means that this has failed at being a pop-linguistics book but but I don't care because, hell, yeah, give me all the corpus linguistics on food words.
I don't know offhand if Jurafsky is one of the regular posters at Language Log -- I don't think so? -- but I feel like this is basically a whole book of the sort of thing I'd expect to see on Language Log, if that gives you an idea of the style. Language Log does get namedropped.
Anyway, yeah: five stars from me. Probably not five stars from you, but, hey, this is my review.
I realize this may sound like an odd statement to make, because it is an incredibly niche topic, but I spent a long, long time studying theoretical linguistics. And of all the courses I took, of everything I learned, one of the things I still remember is the first day of the Introduction To Historical Linguistics class I took as an undergraduate. It was a big class, maybe fifty of us, and the professor asked us to come up with the word for "tea" in as many languages as we could. And because this was a room of fifty linguistics majors, we knew a whole lot of languages, as an aggregate. And as we called out words she wrote them all down on the board, sorting them into one of two groups, by whether they sounded more like "tea" or whether they sounded more like "chai."
Now, you probably know where this party trick is going, but at the time I didn't know: the words that sound more like "tea" are from Min te and the words that sound like "chai" are from Cantonese cha. Different countries traded with two different groups of people who each had their own word for the stuff, and they borrowed the word of the people they got tea from, and then more languages borrowed the word from those languages, and so on and so forth. Twenty years later, this class exercise still sticks with me.
So I was really excited to find this book, The Language of Food, by Dan Jurafsky, of Jurafsky & Martin fame; if you ever learned anything about NLP you have probably read his textbook. I came across this book in a great article about cultural preferences for what foods should accompany other foods recast as a kind of "food grammar," and I thought that was interesting enough for me to pick up the book.
I almost didn't buy this book, because I was put off by a lot of the negative reviews calling this book dry and calling his language usage infelicitous. These reviews seem to take as the ultimate put-down of a linguist, because I guess a linguist should know how to make sentences pretty. I regret to inform everyone who thinks that linguists automatically have some advantage at producing beautiful prose that the answer is definitely no there. (Yes, reading my first linguistics journal articles was a disappointment to me too.) By the standards of linguistics articles, this is pretty readable. I feel like I have to say this whenever I review any pop-linguistics book. Linguistics writing gets a whole lot uglier than this, people. So if you have some familiarity with scholarly linguistics, I'm pretty sure nothing about the diction here is going to bug you.
I will concede the point about the typos -- because, yeah, there are definitely a few misspellings someone should have caught. I think the most unfortunate typos were the ones in the French because now I'm wondering whether the Middle French had typos and I will never know, because do you even know what Middle French looks like? Yeah.
(Incidentally, do ebooks not support macrons? Every single macroned letter in this book is a graphic of a macron and not a typed character.)
There are a lot of pop-linguistics books that I think make great introductions to various elements of linguistics for laypeople; I really liked Anthony Burgess' (yes, that Anthony Burgess) A Mouthful of Air. (And then there's pop-linguistics books you should stay away from, like that one book by Bill Bryson.) There are also pop-linguistics books that try to split their focus between Things Linguists Will Care About and Things Normal People Will Care About and don't do a great job of it. For example, I really wanted to like Daniel Everett's Don't Sleep There Are Snakes but it didn't go into quite enough detail about Pirahã to be satisfying on the linguistics front but at the same time I cannot imagine what anyone who wasn't a linguist got out of, say, the chapter that was a blistering takedown of UG based on the data that Pirahã has no recursion. (But, hey, if you do know what that means, you know you're in for a wild ride. But if you do know what that means, you've probably also read some of the scholarly work on Pirahã.)
And then there's this book, which is neither of the above. As far as I can tell, this is book sprinkled with just enough Basic Etymology Facts about various words for food that someone who might enjoy a book about food words will unwittingly pick it up. The rest of this book is doing an extremely bad job pretending to be a pop-linguistics book, because what this book actually is is a whole bunch of corpus linguistics, using corpora that consist of things like restaurant menus, restaurant reviews, and food advertising copy. Awesome! There's also a lot of very thorough discussion of the origins of particular foods with a style of argumentation that will look really familiar if you've ever read (or written) the kind of linguistics paper where you bring every counterexample you can find and lay them all out.
(The fact that it was by Dan Jurafsky made a lot more sense when I figured that bit out. Because of course he's doing corpus work. Before I started reading it I was just like, well, I guess everyone likes food.)
You too can find out how many cents every extra letter in a word in a menu description adds to the price! Thrill at the differing emphasis on "choice" at cheap versus expensive restaurants! Learn how Gricean maxims explain the use (or lack of use) of terms such as "delicious" and "real mashed potatoes! (If you know what Gricean maxims are, you have probably worked that out yourself, you pragmatist, you.) Marvel at the corpus work on positive and negative attitudes in restaurant reviews, including the discussion of how negative reviews share many elements with trauma narratives. (I was not expecting that. It was great.)
My only objection is the chapter that had, as its big reveal, the idea that we associate nonce words with front vowels with small, light things and nonce words with back vowels with large, heavy things -- specifically, the explanation that small creatures make higher-pitched sounds and that larger creatures make lower-pitched sounds. I haven't read any of the work on this, so it's possible that the actual paper by Ohala addresses this, but: Jurafsky begins this explanation by characterizing the difference between front and back vowels as differing in the location in your mouth where your tongue is placed. Which, I guess, is incidentally true.
But if you know anything about acoustic phonetics, you know that even though tongue height and backness are the traditional idea behind how vowels are arranged on a vowel chart, what we are actually mapping is the relationship between their first formant (F1) which is height, and their second formant (F2), which is backness. Jurafsky then, as far as I can tell, conflates this with pitch (F0, fundamental frequency), which is neither of the above things, and says that front vowels have higher pitches (uh? as far as I know, high vowels are the ones with higher intrinsic pitches) and specifically higher-pitched second formants (F2) than back vowels. For those of you playing along at home, the literal difference between front and back vowels is their F2. So he's just said that front vowels are associated with small things because they have a higher F2 and back vowels are associated with large things because they have a lower F2. Congratulations, this is the actual acoustic definition of vowel backness. Front vowels are associated with small things because they are front vowels. Good to know.
Jurafsky then attempts to say that this is the exact same claim as saying that smaller animals produce sounds with a higher F0 (pitch) than larger animals which have a lower F0. And, yes, that is an assertion that looks pretty obviously right if you've ever heard, say, a Pomeranian and a Samoyed barking -- but it is also not the same assertion as the claim about F2. Because F0 is not F2. Is it true that a higher F0 also raises the frequency of the other formants? Yes, that is true -- it's not a 1:1 correlation, but it's there. (The data I am finding says that Peterson and Barney (1952) say that women have a F0 1.7 times higher than men but their formants are only 1.15 times higher.) And obviously we can perceive F2 because that's how we identify front vs. back vowels, but that's not F0. Saying F0 and F2 were the same thing would be like saying that identifying vowels is dependent on pitch, and in most vocal ranges that isn't the case, as far as I know.
(It's possible for speakers with a very high F0 to have a F0 higher than where their own F1 ought to be on some vowels, which can lead to problems with vowel identification. IIRC, classically-trained sopranos can also get F0 higher than even where some of their own F2s are expected; I am informed that they also are trained essentially to be able to consciously manipulate where their formants occur.)
So, yes, what he's saying is true, but as far as I can tell, the explanation has been simplified down to the point where it's hanging off an assertion that F0 and F2 are the same, which is not actually true. They are correlated, but they are not measuring the same thing at all. You know that meme that's like "I don't understand how, but you used the wrong formula and got the right answer?" That's what reading this chapter felt like.
What's more, this doesn't explain why all the front vowels in his nonce words were high front vowels but the height of the back vowels varied from [u] all the way down to [a]. Where do low front vowels go? Why aren't they here? Is [æ] not associated with small things? Is it because the vowel space gets smaller at the bottom and that the difference in F2 between low front and low back vowels is not as pronounced as when the vowels are higher? I mean, yeah, probably, that's my guess. I just thought it was a weird thing that didn't get brought up at all here. Probably that means I should go read Ohala's paper.
Anyway, other than that, it was a great book. I nitpick because I love.
Honestly, I feel like this is a five-star book for anyone who thinks the phrase "corpus linguistics on restaurant menus" sounds like a good time, and if that's you I hope you're already buying this because you're gonna love it. I have no idea what the hell the rest of you are going to get out of this, which is probably why the ratings of this book are so varied, because the answer for a lot of people is clearly "not much." And that probably means that this has failed at being a pop-linguistics book but but I don't care because, hell, yeah, give me all the corpus linguistics on food words.
I don't know offhand if Jurafsky is one of the regular posters at Language Log -- I don't think so? -- but I feel like this is basically a whole book of the sort of thing I'd expect to see on Language Log, if that gives you an idea of the style. Language Log does get namedropped.
Anyway, yeah: five stars from me. Probably not five stars from you, but, hey, this is my review.
April 30, 2021
Dan Jurafsky’s “The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu” was an engaging and informative novel about the linguistics of cuisine. Jurafsky does a wonderful job at combining history, food, and word-use in a light and “palatable” way. The author even substantiates his chapters with modern linguistic research about human culinary behaviors and language. Though I enjoyed the format of the book's narrative (the author moves through the different courses in a menu), I did find myself lost sometimes about which food, historical event, or research he was describing. This could have been because I chose to listen to it as an audiobook - so I might try listening to it again while reading it in order to to get the full experience and better retain the information! Also, I did feel the author revealed a little too much of the “surprising” information in his introduction. The book might have been even more enjoyable to have those surprising nuggets of information given throughout the book. All in all, a really great read if you love food and language!
March 20, 2021
This book brings together two of my favourite subjects of idle chatter: the origins of words and the origins of foods. The biggest revelation for me has been the outsized impact of medieval Islamic cuisine on modern western foods and food habits -- fish and chips? macarons? ice cream? I never knew! The second-biggest revelation, that I could, like the author's mother-in-law, convert my neglected oven into a convenient storage space for pots and pans! I'm also grateful for the copious references to further reading about specific topics.
May 27, 2020
Well, I had expectations, I enjoyed it, but it was not what I expected.
May 27, 2021
My love for food meets linguistics and etymology. We start with the origin of the word 'ceviche' in the first chapter and eventually come to know so many of our culinary terms have arrived thanks to the cooks of Persian, Iranian and the medieval Islamic times like 'sherbet' which gave rise to the word 'syrup' and 'sorbet'. Jurafsky's own work comprises how we read menus at a restaurant and how the language is an indication of whether the restaurant is expensive or modest. We travel through China where we encounter the rise of the word 'ketchup' which means 'preserved fish sauce' and also travel to Italy to see the advent of pasta and macaroni. Packed with information about how we talk about food.
October 23, 2021
有趣的题材！从这本书里知道了炸鱼薯条的由来，macaron, macaroni或者macaroon的区别……现在流行的各种美食，不仅可以让我们大快朵颐，也是各地区大众文化的产物。放下书，需要去享受一下马卡龙！
September 18, 2023
As tempting as it is to knock off a star for the constant mentions of San Francisco, this really is a must-read for anyone interested in food or linguistics. Some of the insights are so fascinating and perspective-changing, I already know I’ll be thinking about them for quite a while!
August 8, 2014
What do the chewy coconut cookies I know as macaroons have to do with the French almond cookies called macarons? Is it just a coincidence they have practically the same name? A misunderstanding? Stanford linguist Dan Jurafsky not only explains the relationship between the two, but shows how macaroni is also related, linguistically speaking.
The Language of Food is a collection of long essays about the linguistics, origins, and usages of words having to do with food. Each chapter covers another way in which food and language combine to reveal quite a lot about who we are and who we were. As humans, we really only need a few words and a few foods to sustain life, but we've managed to turn both into entertainment, and even art.
Along the way we get to learn how we came to "toast" an occasion with alcohol (it actually did involve toasted bread at one time) and how ice cream was invented. There's a discussion of the changes in how menus differ from a hundred years ago and on how marketers invent brand names for food items.
Jurafsky keeps a casual tone while divulging a massive amount of information. I believe this is his first book for a general audience, and hope there will be more.
The Language of Food is a collection of long essays about the linguistics, origins, and usages of words having to do with food. Each chapter covers another way in which food and language combine to reveal quite a lot about who we are and who we were. As humans, we really only need a few words and a few foods to sustain life, but we've managed to turn both into entertainment, and even art.
Along the way we get to learn how we came to "toast" an occasion with alcohol (it actually did involve toasted bread at one time) and how ice cream was invented. There's a discussion of the changes in how menus differ from a hundred years ago and on how marketers invent brand names for food items.
Jurafsky keeps a casual tone while divulging a massive amount of information. I believe this is his first book for a general audience, and hope there will be more.
December 22, 2015
There is a lot of interesting history here but the linguistics part of it, which is what I thought would be most interesting, gets somewhat lost in print. I wish I had listened to this on audio book to get the full understanding of the routes to the subtle changes in words. While some of them are just matters of simple letter transposition or slight spelling changes, most appear to have been from hearing in one language and trying to translate those sounds into another. There are also many words I just had no idea how to pronounce and would have liked to hear.
My other complaint is that the author very awkwardly inserts these little personal notes that don't really add anything and, in fact, make it feel a little like a vanity book written for friends. It's a shame because the rest of the book is very professional while still being readable.
A good book for readers who like to dip into things here and there since the book reads more like a collection of essays. There is some slight crossover or mention of another chapter but I don't think the reader would be lost in these cases.
Quite a few historical recipes are added and there are lots of illustrations that add to the education. Extensive notes and references sections for those who can't get enough.
My other complaint is that the author very awkwardly inserts these little personal notes that don't really add anything and, in fact, make it feel a little like a vanity book written for friends. It's a shame because the rest of the book is very professional while still being readable.
A good book for readers who like to dip into things here and there since the book reads more like a collection of essays. There is some slight crossover or mention of another chapter but I don't think the reader would be lost in these cases.
Quite a few historical recipes are added and there are lots of illustrations that add to the education. Extensive notes and references sections for those who can't get enough.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 357 reviews