The book The Language of Food by Stanford linguist Dan Jurafsky has just been published, and press coverage has been heartening. I am pleased not only because I consider Dan a friend (I was his teaching assistant years ago at the University of Colorado) and because I enjoy his Language of Food blog. It is also because the news stories expose readers to linguistic ideas ranging from etymology and vocabulary to pragmatics, the philosophy of language, computational linguistics, corpus studies, and – yes – linguistic anthropology.
Here then is a brief round up of the press coverage I have seen so far of Jurafsky and his book, The Language of Food.
- “Decoding your restaurant menu” by Steven Levingston, Washington Post
- “Decoding a Menu at Root & Bone” by Jennifer Schuessler, New York Times
- “‘Language Of Food’ Reveals Mysteries Of Menu Words And Ketchup”, NPR
- “The language of menus”, The Financial Express
- “Foodie literature has a new champion” by Debbie Salomon, Burlington Free Press
And for lagniappe, Dan Jurafsky’s guest column “The secret language of food” appeared in the August 22 Financial Times.
The book The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu is published by W. W. Norton.