The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu (19 page)

Negative differentiation comes up in all sorts of domains. For example, across languages there seem to be
more adjectives to describe pain than pleasure
. We use more varied
vocabulary to describe people we dislike
than people we like. People even describe attractive faces as more similar to each other while unattractive faces differ more from each other. This generalization that there are more different ways to be negative than to be positive was most famously stated by Tolstoy at the beginning of Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Words for smell seem particularly disposed to the negative trend. English, for example, has no commonly used positive word meaning “smells good” that corresponds to
delicious
for taste or
beautiful
for sight. Languages generally seem to have a
smaller vocabulary for smell
than for other senses, relying on words for tastes (like
sweet
or
salty
) or names of objects (like
gamy
,
musky
,
skunky
,
or metallic
).

Some languages do have somewhat
richer olfactory vocabularies
, like Janet’s native language, Cantonese. Unlike English, Cantonese has
a common word that means “smells good,”
heung
, often translated as “fragrant.”
Fragrant
in English is rare and poetic, but the everyday Cantonese
heung
(and its Mandarin cognate
xiang
) is just how you say you like the smell of what’s cooking. It’s such a frequent word that you’ve all seen it:
heung
is the first part of the name
Heung Gong
(Hong Kong; “smells-good harbor”).

Cantonese is particularly rich in words for negative smells
. Here are some:

Note the numbers following each word. Cantonese has six tones, characteristic rising or falling pitches, and the meaning of a word varies depending on the tone used. The richness of this language is not limited to ways to say
stinky
.

Many of the words listed above exist in other Chinese dialects as well, and some are very ancient. An essay on cuisine in a third-century
BCE
Chinese encyclopedia (which Chinese cuisine scholar Fuchsia Dunlop calls
“perhaps the world’s oldest extant gastronomic treatise”
) records the ancient advice of the sixteenth-century
BCE
cook Yi Yin on how to eliminate fishy (
seng1
) and gamy (
sou1
) smells.

Sadly, use of this ancient and rich negative smell vocabulary seems to be dying out of Cantonese. Studies show that younger Hong Kong speakers know fewer of these words than their elders, as sanitization and plastic wrap eliminate opportunities to experience what linguist
Hilario de Sousa delicately calls
“the variety of olfactory sensations experienced by their ancestors.”

The minimal smell vocabularies of many languages may be recent and due to urbanization (languages retaining the vocabulary are often spoken outside the cities), ancient and genetic (many
genes coding for the detection of specific odors
are turned off in humans, perhaps dating back to the development of tricolor vision in primates), or related to human variation in smell perception. For example, genetic variations lead to differences in detecting the
grassy smell of sauvignon blanc
, partially caused by the flavor compound cis-3-hexen-1-ol. The
ability to detect the sulfurous smell of asparagus
in urine has similar genetic links; according to one recent experiment, about 8 percent of people don’t produce it, and about 6 percent can’t smell it. (My biologist wife, upon reading that paper, immediately conducted an impromptu experiment on yours truly by cooking up a big batch of asparagus.) The vast variation over the many different abilities of smell might have made it harder for a language to develop a stable shared olfactory vocabulary.

The greater differentiation of negative smells is but one aspect of
negativity bias
, the idea that humans are
biased to be especially aware of negative situations
. Bad reviews like the one at the start of the chapter display another. To understand, we need to look beyond the negative emotional words like
horrible
,
terrible
,
awful
, and
nasty
and focus instead on the story being told. Yes, story.

Linguist Douglas Biber has shown
that we use past tense, communication verbs (said, told), and event words (then, after) much more frequently when telling stories, and the negative reviews are filled with these features. Let’s also look at the common nouns most strongly associated with them:

manager customer minutes money waitress waiter bill attitude management business apology mistake table charge order hostess tip

Not a one of these words refers to food! Instead, bad reviews are stories about bad things done by other people. The waiter or waitress made some mistake, messed up the order or the bill, or had a bad attitude, the manager didn’t help, the hostess caused a long wait, and so on.

In addition, bad reviews overwhelmingly use the pronouns we or us (“We waited,” “our entrées,” “us having to”). While other reviews use those pronouns too, “we” and “us” are vastly overrepresented in negative ones. What is the common denominator of these three features: negative emotional words like
terrible
and
horrible
, narrative stories about other people, and a vast increase in
we
and
us
, all strongly linked to 1-star reviews?

The answer comes from
the pioneering work of Texas psychology professor James Pennebaker
, who for decades has studied how words like function words are veiled cues to people’s personalities, attitudes, and feelings. Pennebaker has particularly studied the aftereffects of trauma. His “social stage model of coping” suggests that immediately after a traumatic event, people feel a need to tell stories about the event, stories expressing their negative emotion, and suggests that traumatized people seek comfort in groups by emphasizing their belonging, using the words
we
or
us
with high frequency
.

Pennebaker and his colleagues identified
these tendencies in bloggers talking about their feelings after September 11, 2001, in fans writing about the death of Princess Diana, and in student newspaper articles after campus tragedies. In each case, what people write is just like terrible reviews of restaurants: narratives, stories about the negative things that happened to them, bulwarked against these negative emotions by the solidarity of
us
and
we.
In other words, bad reviews display all the linguistic symptoms of minor trauma.

We always confirm our automated methods by carefully reading selected samples of the reviews. And the tendency toward negative bias is clear, from the negative differentiation in describing skunky beers to the trauma narratives of bad restaurants.

Why do we find negative things more intense and more differentiated than positive things? One possibility is that negative things in the world really are more different from each other than positive things. Perhaps there really is more difference between being evil, brutal, sad, sick, or skunky than there is between being good, gentle, happy, well, or nice. Another possibility is that negative things aren’t actually more different or more potent than positive things, but it’s evolutionarily useful for us to treat them as if they were so. Humans need to worry about and be exceptionally good at distinguishing among negative events. The intuition of this theory is that
there are a lot of ways for things to go wrong in life
, and even though they may be very rare (like tiger attacks and earthquakes and bee stings), they require very different responses. Having different words to talk about how to avoid them helped our ancestors outlive the tiger and the earthquake.

Of course, reviews aren’t all negative. What are the metaphors and other linguistic structures that reviewers use in positive reviews of food or wine?

Let’s start by talking about sex.

Adrienne Lehrer, a linguistics professor at the University of Arizona, studied how wine reviews changed over time from 1975 to 2000. She noticed that in the 1980s wine reviewers began to increase their use of the body as a metaphor, starting to use words like
fleshy
,
muscular
,
sinewy
,
big-boned
, or
broad-shouldered.
At the same time, influential wine writers like
Robert Parker began to emphasize the sensual pleasure
of wine, repeating words like “sexy” and “sensual,” describing wines as “supple and seductive,” “offering voluptuously textured, hedonistic drinking,” or even “liquid Viagra.”
Literature professor Sean Shesgreen says
that all this erotic talk about wine as “pretty and caressing,” “ravishing,” “pillowy,” and “overendowed” affirms that “in the kaleidoscope of Americans’ fixations, gastronomy has eclipsed sex.”

This metaphor of sex seems especially associated with expensive
foods as well. We examined this in the million restaurant reviews by extracting every mention of sex (or related words like
sexy
,
seductive
,
orgasms,
or
lust
) in the reviews. We then used regression, a statistical technique that allowed us to ask how these mentions of sex were associated with people’s ratings of a restaurant, after controlling for factors like the type of cuisine and the city.

Reviewers who liked a restaurant were indeed more likely to use sexual metaphors. But we also discovered an economic interaction; mentions of sex like these are especially frequent for expensive restaurants:

the apple tarty ice cream pastry caramely thing was just
orgasmic
sumptuous flavors, jaw-droppingly good,
sexy
food