Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Briefly noted: today’s Zippy strip, in which our Pinhead reflects on trendy menu language at a carnival food stand:

(#1) Corn-dog foam is all the rage, especially if you can get it artisanal, curated, hand-selected, rustic, on a stick, buddy, on a fuckin’ stick, with almond milk, 2 pumps of caramel, cold foam, extra crispy with locally sourced tripe in Sichuan chili sauce, oh I seem to have lost track of things, what were you asking?

Previously on this blog, in my 12/22/16 posting “Edible adjectives”, about this xkcd cartoon:

(#2) Mark Liberman posted this on Language Log on 12/19, with a link to a 2004 posting of his and with the video of Monty Python’s “Crunchy Frog” sketch.

Mark … includes a reference to Zwicky & Zwicky (1980) on the language of restaurant menus

… Forward to a 9/6/14 posting of mine, “What a difference 30 years makes”, about Dan Jurafsky’s delightful The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu (2014), where in chapter 1, “How to Read a Menu”, Dan and his collaborators looked at a huge database of restaurant menus and subjected the data to an assortment of statistical tests (two things that Z&Z were unable to do).

They uncovered significant connections between item price and several other factors, among them: length of words; use of exotic or spices (“exotifying” language); and use of “linguistic fillers”, of several types

… The more expensive the restaurant, the more sparing in linguistic fillers it is. Dan makes an explicit connection to Gricean reasoning (based on relevance), and refers to Liberman on status anxiety.

This entry was posted on March 21, 2024 at 1:16 pm and is filed under Language and food, Linguistics in the comics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.