http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/17/di...ant-menus.html

The Vocabulary of Food
Decoding a Menu at Root & Bone

By JENNIFER SCHUESSLERSEPT. 15, 2014

The menu at Root & Bone, a Southern restaurant that opened in Alphabet
City in June, is loaded with precision-engineered descriptions like
“Drunken Deviled Eggs,” “Crispy Free-Range Bucket of Bird” and a
breadless BLT that promises to “tickle your pickle.”

But on a recent evening, Dan Jurafsky, a linguistics professor at
Stanford, was puzzling over the redundancy of “local upstate New York
grits.”

It didn’t quite have the protest-too-much ring of the promise of “real
butter” at a greasy spoon, but it did prompt a potted (or maybe Mason
jarred?) lecture on the principles known as Grice’s conversational
maxims, after the philosopher H. Paul Grice.

“Grice said that when we say something, there’s an implicit
understanding that we’re saying it to transmit information to the
hearer, and we don’t say more than we need to,” Mr. Jurafsky said. “If I
say the food is fresh, like cheaper restaurants do, you wonder why I
said that. Is there a reason to think the food isn’t fresh?”

This may not seem like the most enticing table talk. But it was part of
an evening’s work for Mr. Jurafsky, whose new book, “The Language of
Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu,” published this week by W. W. Norton,
aims to sneak some social-science protein past readers drawn in by
topics like exotic ice cream flavors and the history of the word
“toast,” not to mention chapter titles like “Sex, Drugs and Sushi Rolls.”

People may swoon over colorful expressions and interesting etymologies.
And Mr. Jurafsky’s book offers plenty of that, including a chapter
tracing the complicated global journey that turned the Fujianese fish
sauce known as “ke-tchup” into the familiar American red stuff. But for
linguists, the less obviously colorful aspects of our food-talk reveals
much about the deeper structures of our language and psychology.

“A lot of people are attracted to linguistics by words,” he said. “But
language is about so much more. And for scholars, the language of food
is particularly rich: it’s universal, it’s social, and now it’s easily
available online.”

True to his book’s subtitle, Mr. Jurafsky, 51, likes to read menus —
preferably, tens of thousands or even millions at a time. A 2002
MacArthur “genius” award winner for his work on how computers process
human language, he has more recently turned to the social side of
computational linguistics, crunching huge, often food-related data sets,
like the New York Public Library’s recently digitized historical menu
collection or Yelp’s vast archive of restaurant reviews, to tease out
nearly invisible patterns in our everyday use of language.

But don’t call his approach “big data.”

“It’s a little like ‘foodie,’ ” Mr. Jurafsky said. “There’s been a
counter-reaction and you aren’t supposed to say it, even though it’s not
clear what the better term is. Maybe just ‘data science’?”

Mr. Jurafsky, who grew up in Silicon Valley, traces his own food mania
to a childhood discovery of Julia Child, and the more pungent dishes he
encountered while doing research on Cantonese and Mandarin, among other
subjects, in graduate school. He and his wife, Janet Yu, a biologist,
met at a breakfast-for-dinner-themed cooking party, and spent part of
their honeymoon visiting fish sauce factories in Phu Quoc, Vietnam.

But his book, based on his blog of the same name, didn’t begin hatching
until 2008, when he first taught a freshman seminar on the language of
food, with a syllabus featuring readings in history and anthropology as
well as a smattering of technical linguistics papers like “Null Objects
in English Recipes” and “Effects of Ethanol Intoxication on Speech
Suprasegmentals.” (Bottom line: you can’t always tell if someone is
drunk solely from their speech.)

Food studies programs have taken off at universities in the last decade.
But food-related research, Mr. Jurafsky said, is still viewed with some
suspicion among some old-school empirical social scientists. “There’s
this idea that it’s too pop, and if you work on it you’ll never get a
job,” he said.

Some of Mr. Jurafsky’s own research is only incidentally connected to
food, such as a prizewinning 2013 paper (Cristian
Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil was the lead author) that used 10 years’ worth
of reviews on the sites RateBeer and BeerAdvocate to address a broader
question in linguistics: how change occurs in a language community.

Other work has aimed a bit more directly for the stomach. In an as-yet
unpublished paper, Mr. Jurafsky and colleagues from Carnegie Mellon
University analyzed more than 6,500 online menus containing some 650,000
dishes. While cheaper menus had more dishes and wordier descriptions,
they found, more-expensive menus tended to use longer words, with each
additional letter of length correlating to a 10-cent higher price a
dish. Root & Bone’s menu, Mr. Jurafsky said, contained a few more
participles (grilled, loaded, stuffed, dusted, brined) than you
typically see on menus where meatloaf costs $24. Not that the extra
words always gave a clear idea of the creative dishes to come. “Wow!
That is amazing,” Mr. Jurafsky said when a dish billed as “Grilled Sweet
Corn Cob ... Husk N All” landed on the table at Root & Bone, revealing
itself to be an ear of corn slathered with cornbread-butter paste and
buried in an avalanche of popcorn and fried hominy. It was presented
alongside an elaborately knotted, fountain-like husk.

He popped a golden kernel of hominy into his mouth. “This is really
incredible,” he said. “Salty all the way down.”

If his language lacked the vividness of the food, there’s another lesson
there. In a study of more than a million Yelp restaurant reviews, Mr.
Jurafsky and the Carnegie Mellon team found that four-star reviews
tended to use a narrower range of vague positive words, while one-star
reviews had a more varied vocabulary. One-star reviews also had higher
incidence of past tense, pronouns (especially plural pronouns) and other
subtle markers that linguists have previously found in fans’ writing
about the death of Princess Diana and blog posts written in the months
after the Sept. 11 attacks.

In short, Mr. Jurafsy said, authors of one-star reviews unconsciously
use language much as people do in the wake of collective trauma. “They
use the word ‘we’ much more than ‘I,’ as if taking solace in the fact
that this bad thing happened, but it happened to us together,” he said.

Another finding: Reviews of expensive restaurants are more likely to use
sexual metaphors, while the food at cheaper restaurants tends to be
compared to drugs. In his book, Mr. Jurafsky traces the gradual fading
of French as the lingua franca of “fancy” American restaurants. “Entree”
has gone all but extinct at the high end, though there are some holdouts
like “jus,” used at Root & Bone to describe the silky chicken gravy
served alongside “Grandma Daisy’s Angel Biscuits,” dipping sauce style.

The “Southern Peach Caprese,” on the other hand, built around an oozing
ball of fried pimento cheese, testified to Italian food’s rising
fortunes. “Caprese has become such a common word, we can now use it as a
metaphor for something else,” Mr. Jurafsky said. “You can expect your
customer to know what it is.”

Mr. Jurafsky loves a good riches-to-rags-to-riches culinary tale. One
chapter in his book traces the evolution of “macaroni” — imported into
English by pasta-loving 18th-century dandies — from symbol of
upper-class affectation (think “Yankee Doodle”) to Middle America
mainstay to retro comfort food subject to infinitely varied upscaling.
Before dessert (and a discourse on regional variations in the
pronunciation of “pecan”), he expressed hope that food itself would
become a similarly uncontroversial staple of the academic social-science
larder.

“The language of food is this secret hidden in plain sight,” he said.
“We have all this amazing data all around us. How can we not use it?”

In article >,
Travis McGee > wrote:

> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/17/di...-decodes-resta
> urant-menus.html
>
> The Vocabulary of Food
> Decoding a Menu at Root & Bone
>
> By JENNIFER SCHUESSLERSEPT. 15, 2014
>
> The menu at Root & Bone, a Southern restaurant that opened in Alphabet
> City in June, is loaded with precision-engineered descriptions like
> ³Drunken Deviled Eggs,² ³Crispy Free-Range Bucket of Bird² and a
> breadless BLT that promises to ³tickle your pickle.²
>
> But on a recent evening, Dan Jurafsky, a linguistics professor at
> Stanford, was puzzling over the redundancy of ³local upstate New York
> grits.²
>
<snip>

Thanks for posting this. I think this should be the next book I tackle
(assuming I ever finish the one I'm wading through now). I like books
like this. (Shouldn't say that, since I have not read it yet. But It
is, after all, written by an academic!)

Dave W.
Retired academic
In the Ozarks

"Travis McGee" > wrote in message
...
> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/17/di...ant-menus.html
>
> The Vocabulary of Food
> Decoding a Menu at Root & Bone
>
> By JENNIFER SCHUESSLERSEPT. 15, 2014
>
> The menu at Root & Bone, a Southern restaurant that opened in Alphabet
> City in June, is loaded with precision-engineered descriptions like
> “Drunken Deviled Eggs,” “Crispy Free-Range Bucket of Bird” and a breadless
> BLT that promises to “tickle your pickle.”
>
> But on a recent evening, Dan Jurafsky, a linguistics professor at
> Stanford, was puzzling over the redundancy of “local upstate New York
> grits.”
>
> It didn’t quite have the protest-too-much ring of the promise of “real
> butter” at a greasy spoon, but it did prompt a potted (or maybe Mason
> jarred?) lecture on the principles known as Grice’s conversational maxims,
> after the philosopher H. Paul Grice.
>
> “Grice said that when we say something, there’s an implicit understanding
> that we’re saying it to transmit information to the hearer, and we don’t
> say more than we need to,” Mr. Jurafsky said. “If I say the food is fresh,
> like cheaper restaurants do, you wonder why I said that. Is there a reason
> to think the food isn’t fresh?”
>
> This may not seem like the most enticing table talk. But it was part of an
> evening’s work for Mr. Jurafsky, whose new book, “The Language of Food: A
> Linguist Reads the Menu,” published this week by W. W. Norton, aims to
> sneak some social-science protein past readers drawn in by topics like
> exotic ice cream flavors and the history of the word “toast,” not to
> mention chapter titles like “Sex, Drugs and Sushi Rolls.”
>
> People may swoon over colorful expressions and interesting etymologies.
> And Mr. Jurafsky’s book offers plenty of that, including a chapter tracing
> the complicated global journey that turned the Fujianese fish sauce known
> as “ke-tchup” into the familiar American red stuff. But for linguists, the
> less obviously colorful aspects of our food-talk reveals much about the
> deeper structures of our language and psychology.
>
> “A lot of people are attracted to linguistics by words,” he said. “But
> language is about so much more. And for scholars, the language of food is
> particularly rich: it’s universal, it’s social, and now it’s easily
> available online.”
>
> True to his book’s subtitle, Mr. Jurafsky, 51, likes to read menus —
> preferably, tens of thousands or even millions at a time. A 2002 MacArthur
> “genius” award winner for his work on how computers process human
> language, he has more recently turned to the social side of computational
> linguistics, crunching huge, often food-related data sets, like the New
> York Public Library’s recently digitized historical menu collection or
> Yelp’s vast archive of restaurant reviews, to tease out nearly invisible
> patterns in our everyday use of language.
>
> But don’t call his approach “big data.”
>
> “It’s a little like ‘foodie,’ ” Mr. Jurafsky said. “There’s been a
> counter-reaction and you aren’t supposed to say it, even though it’s not
> clear what the better term is. Maybe just ‘data science’?”
>
> Mr. Jurafsky, who grew up in Silicon Valley, traces his own food mania to
> a childhood discovery of Julia Child, and the more pungent dishes he
> encountered while doing research on Cantonese and Mandarin, among other
> subjects, in graduate school. He and his wife, Janet Yu, a biologist, met
> at a breakfast-for-dinner-themed cooking party, and spent part of their
> honeymoon visiting fish sauce factories in Phu Quoc, Vietnam.
>
> But his book, based on his blog of the same name, didn’t begin hatching
> until 2008, when he first taught a freshman seminar on the language of
> food, with a syllabus featuring readings in history and anthropology as
> well as a smattering of technical linguistics papers like “Null Objects in
> English Recipes” and “Effects of Ethanol Intoxication on Speech
> Suprasegmentals.” (Bottom line: you can’t always tell if someone is drunk
> solely from their speech.)
>
> Food studies programs have taken off at universities in the last decade.
> But food-related research, Mr. Jurafsky said, is still viewed with some
> suspicion among some old-school empirical social scientists. “There’s this
> idea that it’s too pop, and if you work on it you’ll never get a job,” he
> said.
>
> Some of Mr. Jurafsky’s own research is only incidentally connected to
> food, such as a prizewinning 2013 paper (Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil
> was the lead author) that used 10 years’ worth of reviews on the sites
> RateBeer and BeerAdvocate to address a broader question in linguistics:
> how change occurs in a language community.
>
> Other work has aimed a bit more directly for the stomach. In an as-yet
> unpublished paper, Mr. Jurafsky and colleagues from Carnegie Mellon
> University analyzed more than 6,500 online menus containing some 650,000
> dishes. While cheaper menus had more dishes and wordier descriptions, they
> found, more-expensive menus tended to use longer words, with each
> additional letter of length correlating to a 10-cent higher price a dish.
> Root & Bone’s menu, Mr. Jurafsky said, contained a few more participles
> (grilled, loaded, stuffed, dusted, brined) than you typically see on menus
> where meatloaf costs $24. Not that the extra words always gave a clear
> idea of the creative dishes to come. “Wow! That is amazing,” Mr. Jurafsky
> said when a dish billed as “Grilled Sweet Corn Cob ... Husk N All” landed
> on the table at Root & Bone, revealing itself to be an ear of corn
> slathered with cornbread-butter paste and buried in an avalanche of
> popcorn and fried hominy. It was presented alongside an elaborately
> knotted, fountain-like husk.
>
> He popped a golden kernel of hominy into his mouth. “This is really
> incredible,” he said. “Salty all the way down.”
>
> If his language lacked the vividness of the food, there’s another lesson
> there. In a study of more than a million Yelp restaurant reviews, Mr.
> Jurafsky and the Carnegie Mellon team found that four-star reviews tended
> to use a narrower range of vague positive words, while one-star reviews
> had a more varied vocabulary. One-star reviews also had higher incidence
> of past tense, pronouns (especially plural pronouns) and other subtle
> markers that linguists have previously found in fans’ writing about the
> death of Princess Diana and blog posts written in the months after the
> Sept. 11 attacks.
>
> In short, Mr. Jurafsy said, authors of one-star reviews unconsciously use
> language much as people do in the wake of collective trauma. “They use the
> word ‘we’ much more than ‘I,’ as if taking solace in the fact that this
> bad thing happened, but it happened to us together,” he said.
>
> Another finding: Reviews of expensive restaurants are more likely to use
> sexual metaphors, while the food at cheaper restaurants tends to be
> compared to drugs. In his book, Mr. Jurafsky traces the gradual fading of
> French as the lingua franca of “fancy” American restaurants. “Entree” has
> gone all but extinct at the high end, though there are some holdouts like
> “jus,” used at Root & Bone to describe the silky chicken gravy served
> alongside “Grandma Daisy’s Angel Biscuits,” dipping sauce style.
>
> The “Southern Peach Caprese,” on the other hand, built around an oozing
> ball of fried pimento cheese, testified to Italian food’s rising fortunes.
> “Caprese has become such a common word, we can now use it as a metaphor
> for something else,” Mr. Jurafsky said. “You can expect your customer to
> know what it is.”
>
> Mr. Jurafsky loves a good riches-to-rags-to-riches culinary tale. One
> chapter in his book traces the evolution of “macaroni” — imported into
> English by pasta-loving 18th-century dandies — from symbol of upper-class
> affectation (think “Yankee Doodle”) to Middle America mainstay to retro
> comfort food subject to infinitely varied upscaling. Before dessert (and a
> discourse on regional variations in the pronunciation of “pecan”), he
> expressed hope that food itself would become a similarly uncontroversial
> staple of the academic social-science larder.
>
> “The language of food is this secret hidden in plain sight,” he said. “We
> have all this amazing data all around us. How can we not use it?”

I find the use of the word "fresh" to be interesting.

Chevy's used to use this word. Fresh Mex. Whatever that means. Yeah, they
made their own tortillas on premises. Not that I ever had one. There was
nothing on the menu that I'd order that actually came with tortillas. But
what I did order tasted anything but fresh. Especially that gooey glob of
cornmeal looking whatever it was at the side of the plate. The salsa was
just plain awful as well.

They put a Chevy's in Lynnwood shortly before I moved away. I tried it
once, hoping it would be better the second time. It wasn't. And they
didn't stay open for very long either. My dad said they just weren't
getting any business.

Taco Time advertises, "Good, good fresh, fresh, Taco Time!" But do they
make their own tortillas? No. They use crisp taco shells and it the food
is hardly authentic Mexican but they do offer low fat options like white
chicken chili and they have a lot of salads which can be made low or lower
carb. And the vegetables are fresh to be sure!

Then we have Azteca which is anything but fresh and doesn't claim to be. We
once had three orders of fajitas that were so inedible, we only ate some of
the rice, beans, tortillas then asked for the bill. They tried to give us a
box but we declined. Thankfully we didn't have to pay for the meal as my
husband had free meal coupons. I am pretty sure the meat and veg came
frozen. The meat was like shoe leather and the veggies were cooked to a
mush.

But we have countless other restaurants around here, Mexican and otherwise
that serve fresh food. And yet most do not make that claim. Is it because
they assume that we know that the food will be fresh? Go to Qdoba around
8:00 at night and I can assure you that it won't be.