Review by New York Times Review
IT'S SURPRISING THAT even in this data-driven era, we don't know exactly how many words there are in English. Every specialty has its jargon, of course, its own subset of terms that separate the knowing from the newbies. When expertise is often measured in language, knowing the lingo shows that you're ready to talk the talk, which is especially important in fields that touch our lives as frequently and intimately as food and finance. That makes this the perfect time for a book like Dan Jurafsky's "The Language of Food." A professor of linguistics and computer science at Stanford who teaches a course and maintains a blog of the same name, Jurafsky has worked with other computational linguists to study the ways food is described, assembling thousands of online menus, one million restaurant reviews and five million beer commentaries. The resulting book, with its abundance of colorful culinary and etymological history framing serious research, is a model of rigor and readability. At this scale, reviews are no longer opinions: They are data. We learn that positive beer reviews tend to use vague words (amazing, perfect, incredible), whereas negative ones are specific and even technical in their vocabulary (metallic, colorless, overcarbonated). Bad experiences in restaurants become narratives, using the pronouns "we," "us" and "our" much more often than in positive reviews ("we waited," "our entrees"). The most common words used in negative reviews don't even have to do with food: manager, attitude, mistake, tip. Jurafsky is particularly skilled at connecting familiar food words with surprising linguistic patterns, and there are revelations on nearly every page. A large number of sexual metaphors in positive restaurant reviews correlates with higher prices on the menu. The language of drug addiction ("These cupcakes are like crack") is associated with junk food - blaming the food that we know is bad for us. Expensive potato chips use negative phrases relating to craft ("never fried," "nothing fake or phony"), while inexpensive potato chips emphasize "tradition" or "classic" recipes. Ice cream is usually named with round open vowels ("Rocky Road," "Cookie Dough"), but cracker names tend to use thin-sounding closed vowels ("Ritz," "Wheat Thins," "Triscuit"). Though food terms are the richest source of new foreign-language additions to English dictionaries today, the process by which one culture adopts another's cuisine is nothing new. A word's etymology is its biography, telling the story of how it came to have the meaning we know. In tandem with his many etymological histories, Jurafsky traces the history of the foods themselves: Ketchup was originally a fish sauce; sushi initially used fermented fish; pecan pie started as custard; fish and chips, ceviche and tempura all hark back to an ancient recipe invented by Zoroastrian Persians. His brilliant achievement is to weave together the journey food makes through culture with the journey its name makes through language. John Lanchester has also written engagingly about food, particularly in his outrageous and delectable novel "The Debt to Pleasure." But his attention has recently shifted to finance, and particularly the task of putting the Humpty Dumpty world economy back together after the crisis of 2008. A writer with a fine-tuned ear for irony, Lanchester perceives the often opaque language of banking as a cloak - intentional or not - for the dubious actions of financial institutions. He explains this language in "How to Speak Money," an idiosyncratic collection of short, sharp essays translating the jargon of finance with admirable concision and wit. Translation is necessary because so many of these terms have come to mean the opposite of what they seem to mean. Lanchester coins the term "reversification" to describe this phenomenon. "Bailout" goes from pouring water out to pouring money in. "Inflation" doesn't mean getting larger but rather buying less. "Security" now means risk, and "credit" now means debt. A hedge fund should mean a fund that is protected against loss; instead hedge funds are enormously risky bets - he notes that 90 percent fail - that are nevertheless largely unregulated. The confusion of important terms is also a problem: How can voters make informed decisions if they keep mixing up mean and median, or debt and deficit? Reversification also occurs at the level of economic theory and practice. The problem with mortgage-backed securities wasn't the mortgages or the securities - it was the backing. If the institution that granted the mortgage no longer has a stake in its payment, Lanchester writes, "the basic premise of banking - that you lend money only to people who can pay it back - has been broken." This led to the reversal of the fundamental tenet of neoliberal economics "that markets can self-regulate," since the markets created the problem that governments then had to step in to fix. Profits were private, but losses were shared: another dismaying switcheroo. The result is increasing inequality, the moral backdrop of the book. The neoliberal mantra of cutting taxes on the rich, dominant since the era of Reagan and Thatcher, was accompanied by the promise that all incomes would rise accordingly. Instead, though G.D.P. has grown, an astonishing increase in the assets of the already rich has not led to improvement for the poor and middle-class. In Lanchester's words, "It's becoming clear that if these policies were going to work, they would have already worked by now." TWO OTHER RECENTLY published glossaries are much slighter. In "How to Speak Brit," Christopher J. Moore actually provides little advice on how to understand British English. His short but desultory miscellany includes entries for "eavesdropper," "lame duck," "egghead" and many other terms that are perfectly standard in American English. The articles are light in tone but often brittle and charmless; the definition for "anorak" reads : "A sloppy, unattractive waterproof coat and a slang word for a person who is gray and colorless, such as a politician." The "posh" entry is devoted to the notion that wealthy steamship passengers' trunks were formerly marked "Port Out, Starboard Home," presumably for cooler cabins on the voyage to India - a story so thoroughly and frequently debunked that the Oxford English Dictionary warns readers about it. Elsewhere, he seems to lament the fading importance of the upper-crust accent. Moore's working conviction seems to be that English comes from England and that it used to be better. A similar lack of basic research mars "Lost in Translation," a slim collection of "untranslatable" foreign-language words from the illustrator Ella Frances Sanders. A word in one language without an equivalent in another exposes a lexical hole to fill, and these can be fun, especially when accompanied by the author's graphic images depicting each word's meaning in a vivid folk-art style. The Russian razliubit means "to fall out of love." The Swedish tretar means a second refill, or "threefill," of coffee. The German Kabelsalat ("cable salad") means the mass of tangled cords under your workstation. If the selection suggests an online top 10 list of cool things, that's because it essentially is: It began as a much-forwarded blog post. For all its charm, this grab bag of language tourism is flawed by the absence of pronunciation guidance, the uncertain grammar of some definitions and the absence of fonts for several source languages. PETER SOKOLOWSKI is editor at large at Merriam-Webster.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [November 30, 2014]
