The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu Read Free Page A

the construction of Baghdad, the fabled capital of the Abbasid Dynasty and perhaps the greatest center of learning and science in the medieval world. (As we’ll see in later chapters, Baghdad was also where the fabulous foods of the caliphs were developed that became the source of many of our modern foods.)
    Sibawayhi originally came from Persia to study law, but then one day when reciting out loud he made an embarrassing error in pronouncing an Arabic word. His fellow students shamed him in public for his bad language skills (I guess eighth-century law students wereno less cutthroat than modern ones), and according to at least one story that’s why Sibawayhi switched fields and spent the rest of his life studying linguistics . (Public humiliation is not a method that is normally recommended in modern universities to get students to choose a major. Unless, of course, it gets students interested in linguistics.)
    Sibawayhi’s theory was reinvented and formalized 1200 years later, in the 1930s, when linguist George Zipf suggested that frequently used words are shortened so as to make communication more efficient; you can pack more words in a smaller space and time for your listener if the ones that you use more often, the frequent ones, are shorter. Zipf’s ideas helped lead to the brilliant work of Claude Shannon 10 years later at Bell Labs in creating information theory. Without these ideas, our modern digital collections of menus (or sound recordings, or photographs) would be impossible.
    Anyhow, these rare, long, fancy words that appear more often in expensive restaurants are words like decaffeinated , accompaniments , complements , traditionally , specifications , preparation , overflowing , magnificent , inspiration , exquisitely , and tenderness . By contrast, cheaper restaurants use shorter forms: decaf instead of decaffeinated , sides instead of accompaniments or complements . Words on menus at expensive restaurants average about half a letter longer than those on menus at cheap ones.
    Fancy words are thus an indicator that we are at a fancy restaurant. But using a fancy word in a dish description tells you something even more specific: it tells you about the actual price of the dish!
    To study this, my colleagues and I looked at the price of all 650,000 dishes on the 6500 menus, and used statistical tools to find which words are associated with higher and lower prices. The most important factor that affects the price of a dish is the type of food; lobster costs more than chicken, which costs more than a side of toast. So we statistically controlled for the type of food, the cuisine of the restaurant (Chinese, Italian, steakhouses, diners, cafes) and how expensive the restaurant is, and which city and neighborhood the restaurant was in. After all these controls, we then studied the additional affect of individual words on the prices.
    What we found is that when a restaurant uses longer words to describe a dish, it charges more for the dish. Every increase of one letter in the average length of words describing a dish is associated with an increase of 18 cents in the price of that dish! This means that if a restaurant uses words that are on average three letters longer, you’ll be paying 54 cents extra for your roast chicken or pasta. To our surprise, the phrase “two-bit words” turns out to quite literally (if accidentally) refer to the fifty cents more per dish if the restaurant uses long, fancy words on the menu!
    Counting letters is one way to find out the hidden information that restaurateurs are sneaking onto your menu, but another is to check whether the restaurant emphasizes how exotic or spicy the food is. If so, watch out! Look for phrases like “exotic blend of Indian spices” or “exotic Ethiopian spices” or even just “tamarind fish soup with exotic vegetables.” Our study found that every use of the word exotic or spices raises the price of a dish. Presumably the reason is that such foods