The Language of Food by Dan Jurafsky #
The Language of Food by Dan Jurafsky. I’ve known about this book since it came out in 2015,I was in grad school adjacent to Jurafsky’s department when it came out. but somehow took over a decade to getting around to reading it. Especially surprising since it almost feels algorithmically generated for me.Possibly second only to There’s Always This Year. While I know Jurafsky’s writing from his academic papers and canonical textbook, I’m not surprised that he writes very well for a general audience. The chapters can be read mostly independently, with each one focused on explaining a fun linguistic fact: e.g. that ketchup descends from fish sauce (historically and etymologically), that English and Korean differ in the positive words they use, and why macarons, macaroons, and macaroni are all related. Although some of the intros and outros of the chapters can come off as a tad self-indulgent,You will not forget that Jurafsky and his wife live in San Francisco, that’s for sure. that’s a small price to pay for a fun tour through how to use historical and computational linguistics to understand ourselves better. Grade: B+