Words

Longtime M&G readers know that I love me some food-related intellectualizing. And yesterday was a banner day for just that.

First, I ran across this FWx article about a recent academic paper, authored by a team from the University of Arizona, that examines Twitter language related to food. The map below, which shows, by state, the food term that was "trendiest" between October 2103 and May 2014. (Yes, I know that "trendiest" is not really scientific - and it's my word, not the authors' - but it's the quickest way to describe what they're trying to achieve. They eliminated words used broadly on a national scale but this study does show where words spike regionally - it's not one of those maps that shows the most distinctive word by state.)

The big finding in the map above? It's all about the grits.

The paper itself is wonky but for research and/or food geeks (or both, like me) worth a read. There are some findings related to politics and health matters. Nothing wildly surprising...but interesting, nonetheless.

*****

But that wasn't the end of yesterday's nerdy food and language reading. Last night, Cail sent me a link to this totally interesting Financial Times article about menu and review language. The article's author, Dan Jurafsky, is a linguistics and computer science prof at Stanford. He has recently published  book called The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu, which I just - a few minutes ago - downloaded to my Kindle.

I can't wait to read it, as the article has some great teasers. Like this: when describing food that's delicious, people use the language of sex to describe expensive foods ("seductive" or "voluptuous" for example) but when they're talking about cheap foods, they use the language of addiction ("craving" or "like crack").

That kind of finding is my favorite. I read it and thought, "Of course! That's exactly what happens!" - but I'd never noticed it, even though I do it in my own writing.

Sobremesa

My college friend Judy just posted a Facebook link to this infographic, which illustrates 11 words that have no direct, one-word translation in English. My favorite, by far, is "sobremesa" - a Spanish word for "the time spent after lunch or dinner talking to the people you shared the meal with."

In other words, my very favorite activity. I always just called it "sitting around at the table after dinner, drinking wine and talking."

But as a great lover of efficiency, I'm all for one word. And all for sobremesa.

Fanciful

The English language is so strange sometimes.

When I think "fancy," I usually think about trappings: a ballgown or an elegantly dressed table filled with crystal and china. Of course, those trappings don't have to be so formal; a three-year old in her favorite sparkly tutu is pretty fancy, too.

You know what doesn't seem fancy to me? The shredded "Mexican" cheese I buy from Trader Joe's. Yet there that word is, right on the label.

In the food world, fancy often means either upscale - as in fine dining - or "gourmet," which is how the organizers of the Fancy Food Shows use the word. But it also has these very narrow, very random definitions.

For my cheese, it means it's been shredded into very thin pieces.

On vegetables - fresh, canned or frozen - it can indicate a USDA Grade A product. If you see "extra fancy" on ketchup, it means the tomatoes were Grade A.

On other products, like nuts, fancy means the items have been carefully selected for their perfection.

What I don't know - and can't figure out via the internet - is how "fancy" evolved into all these different things. How did those word branches grow?

Artsy Wednesday: Maps are So Cool

Yesterday, Design*Sponge's Grace Bonney posted something so cool I felt compelled to immediately email my brother and sister. A woman named Jodie Silby, a recent grad of University of Portsmouth, created this map of Portsmouth that illustrates not only the city layout, but also the language of the place. The lines on the map are made of the words and phrases that create the local dialect, and its organized to show how that dialect shifts in terms of neighborhood.

This hits so many of my "this is cool" markers that I'm not sure where to start. Maps? Check. Art? Check. Language? Check. Cultural history and evolution? Check. Innovative and creative display of data? Check. I'm in love with it.

And as soon as I saw it, I started thinking about ways to steal this data presentation idea and make it my own. A food or recipe-related map of Maryland, maybe? A map of food language? Something that shows evolution over time?

The possibilities seem endless.

(Image from Design*Sponge)

The Language of Carbonated Bevs

Serious Eats is really doing it for me today, in the most researchy way possible.

The above map shows what people throughout the US call carbonated soft drinks. The main categories are "pop" (blue), "Coke" (red), "soda" (yellow/olive green) and "other" (light green plus dark purple for regions with no data).

It looks like I live squarely in sodaland, though growing up, I always called CSDs "Coke" ("CSD" is industry parlance, BTW). When a new family from Chicago moved into my parents' neighborhood, we spent years mocking them (gently) for calling Coke "pop". Because that's what kids do, apparently. Make fun of the new neighbors.

I'm not surprised by the broad findings here - that Coke is a southern phenomenon (stemming from Atlanta, I'd guess) and that pop is largely mid and northwestern. What I find fascinating are the little pockets of complete departure from the norm. North Carolina is all over the place, with tons of "other" names for the product. Out west, where sodaland meets pop country, there are a couple of Coke-dominated regions. How does that happen? Who influences that language shift?

I wonder, given the combination of the Internet and people's moving habits, if this whole map will, one day soon, pixelate further or just turn into a sort of plain brown.

Also, I can't help but think about this in the context of Dixon. What will he call CSDs? If today's behavior is any indicator, he'll probably simply call all brands "Not Beer." It's easy that way. He's rarely wrong. (Although he has been quick to identify Diet Cokes lately, too).

Dictionary Friday: Word Origins

Not exactly a standard word-and-definition Dictionary post. I've been reading (slowly) Bill Bryson's book about English, The Mother Tongue. It's not the quickest book I've ever read - it's densely written - but it's full of intereting little facts. Like these:

Asparagus was for 200 years called sparrow-grass.

Hmm. We had asparagus last night, too. It was, unfortunately, a tiny bit past it's expiration date. Plus, I overcooked it (and I NEVER do that). Still. Asparagus. Delicious.
Also:

The Italians do not use brio and although they do use al fresco, to them it signifies not being outside, but being in prison.

Really. Huh. I also liked this passage about Italian and English food words:

The Italians, as we might expect, have over 500 names for different types of macaroni. Some of these, when translated, begin to sound distinctly unappetizing, like strozzapreti, which means "strangled priests." Vermicelli means "little worms" and even spaghetti means "little strings." When you learn that muscatel in Italian means "wine with flies in it," you may conclude that the Italians are gastronomically out to lunch, so to speak, but really their names for foodstuffs are no more disgusting than our hot dogs or those old English favorites, toad-in-the-hole, spotted kick and faggots in gravy.

Every paragraph is like this, which is why it's taking me forever to read. I'm not even halfway through yet (it's short, though, at only 245 pages) but already I've learned a lot. Fortunately, I'm sure I'll be able to put most of it out of my mind the next time I settle into some vermicelli.

Food & Gender

Ann Althouse wrote a post this morning about cold soup, starting by mentioning Bourdain and his childhood experience with vichyssoise (he loved it). Reading a couple of other blogs, she notices a comment made by a female blogger, saying that "chilled soups seem to be a tough sell for men."

Althouse references Real Men Don't Eat Quiche, and asks how her readers feel about gendered foods. I think about the fact that I'm making quiche Lorraine for dinner tonight, and Cooper will be perfectly happy with that. He is also very masculine.

I think I do have some preconceived notions about gender and food, but they're not borne out of widespread stereotypes. Instead, they come from my immediate experiences with the guys around me. For instance, I think of rice served without Asian food as somehow feminine, but only because my dad and brother and Cooper don't like it. But quiche, especially the kind that's full of bacon? Totally gender neutral.

I was also wondering if I'd written anything about this subject before. I hadn't exactly, but last summer I did write about an article exploring the differences between the way men and women cook.

One last thought - English is a gender-neutral language, but I wonder how gendered speech connects to connotations about food in other countries. I'm most familiar with French, and somehow I doubt that French men have many hangups about the gender of their food. But I wonder about other cultures...

Wordy

I've been mulling this post over for a few weeks and finally today, with the tree decorated, my work-work finished and Dixon napping, I feel like I have time to possibly do justice to my thinking. Which may actually be overthinking. We'll see.

A few weeks ago, I read a book that was a little outside the norm for me: a biography of Shakespeare. While I enjoy non-fiction and I like Shakespeare, I wouldn't have picked it up, except that it was written by Bill Bryson and I really like his style of writing.

Anyway, I read it and enjoyed it and learned a lot that could one day help me sweep a Jeopardy category called "The Life of the Bard", or something to that effect.

Possibly the most interesting tidbit I picked up, at least partly because its discovery must have been outrageously tedious, is that we only have proof that Shakespeare actually knew about 20,000 words. Twenty-thousand sort of sounds like a lot, but recent research suggests that average English-speaking adults know at least about 38,000, and college graduates have vocabularies in the neighborhood of 60-75,000 (of course, there are all kinds of footnotes attached to these figures, most notably that nobody agrees whether variations of a word count as one or more, etc. etc.)

I can only assume that Shakespeare's vocabulary was still pretty vast for his era, and on top of that, I'd speculate that his linguistic limitations could have encouraged his creativity in phrasing. Right now, we're stuck in a culture of fairly disposable words - w00t and all that. I'd guess that my vocabulary encompasses most, if not all, of Shakespeare's (though some meanings may have evolved). But in 400 years, will vocabularies include all the words in general use today, plus some? I doubt it. Does that matter? What does it mean about our culture? I don't know.

And, I hear you asking, how is this about food?

Well, actually, it is. And because I waited a few weeks before writing about this, I actually came across something explicitly connecting it to food!

Now I feel a little like I'm cheating because yes, I did link to that Bourdain WaPo chat a few weeks ago. But here's why it's newly relevant:

I think that writing about food and describing taste all the time risks sounding like writing porn. There are only so many adjectives before you cheapen the experience. I think that if we SHOW you the food and describe the ingredients well enough--and you see it cooking--and you get a sense of where we are and the surroundings and the context and the smell of the room, then that's enough. That an occasional "awesome!" is fine. You do the rest. How many times can you use the words "crunchY', "unctuous", "minerally" before they lose all meaning--or worse, become too clinical?

Part of me wonders if this is why I just don't write that much about actual food anymore. I mean, in addition to the fact that there are a million food bloggers and at least 750,000 of them are better than I am at photographing food, describing food, and writing recipes. But I could probably improve on those counts. If I were so inclined. Which I'm not.

So now I feel like I have a fantastically, annoyingly, pretentiously intellectual reason to write about theoretical food rather than real food: the writing itself gels with my newly minted worldview on language. Which is: I am against the practice of coining new words because the more words we have, the fattier and lazier our prose will become. The less Shakespeare-like.

The second half of the rationale, the part about food, is that I actually kind of dislike food writing that's rife with metaphors. I think it usually sounds silly and pretentious.

So if I don't want to create new words, and I don't like food metaphors, how could I effectively write about food with the limited language that exists now?

And the answer is: I don't.