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It's commonly said that the Japanese language wields more food-describing onomatopoeia than any other. These adjectives capture the perceived sounds different foods make when we eat them. Saku saku! Fuwa fuwa! According to estimates, there are 445 such words in the Japanese language. "English has only slightly more than 130 words to describe the way foods feel in our mouths," reports Kendra Pierre-Louis in Popular Science's exploration of food texture in its latest issue themed around taste.

Dan Jurafsky's book, The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu, explores the history and origin of common food terms like "ketchup." Jurafsky also contemplates how menu wording can reflect the relative upscaleness of a restaurant. "Expensive restaurants are 15 times more likely to tell you where the food comes from - to mention the grass-fed things or the name of the farm or greenmarket cucumbers, but expensive restaurants also use fancy, difficult words like tonarelli, or choclo [large-kernaled corn] or pastilla," Jurafsky says. But they are also generally shorter in length. The really long menus, which he says are "stuffed with adjectives like fresh, rich, mild, crisp, tender and golden brown," are found at the middle-priced restaurants. And the cheapest restaurants use "positive but vague words - 'delicious,' 'tasty,' 'savory,' " he says. If an expensive restaurant used words like "fresh" and "delicious," that "implies you have to be convinced." Cheaper restaurants are also likely to say that the food should be served "your way." "The more expensive the restaurant, the more it's all about the chef," he says.

Just in time to celebrate the Year of the Dragon, a comprehensive listing of lucky foods to eat for Chinese New Year. Generally, these foods fall into two categories: they either physically resemble lucky objects (e.g. dumplings look like gold ingots, carrot rounds look like coins) or are homophonic with auspicious phrases (e.g. "ye zi"= coconut, sounds like the words for "father/son", conveying the idea of harmonious parent-child relations). Food for thought.

A Linguist Reads the Menu Hardcover, 246 pages | The words we use for everyday foods contain clues to their origins and hint at their ancient travels across the globe as they merge, fuse and sometimes take on different forms altogether.

"The graph is dramatic. It shows that the odds that prisoners will be successfully paroled start off fairly high at around 65% and quickly plummet to nothing over a few hours (although, see footnote). After the judges have returned from their breaks, the odds abruptly climb back up to 65%, before resuming their downward slide. A prisoner's fate could hinge upon the point in the day when their case is heard."

Fun French foodcentric phrases.

Recent studies suggest that metaphors are more than just fancy literary devices and that there is a psychological basis for linking cold with feelings of social isolation. Psychologists Chen-Bo Zhong and Geoffrey Leonardelli from the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management wanted to test the idea that social isolation might generate a physical feeling of coldness. In their first experiment, they divided a group of volunteers into two groups. One group recalled a personal experience in which they had been socially excluded-rejection from a club, for example. This was meant to tap into their feelings of isolation and loneliness. The other group recalled an experience in which they had been accepted into a group. Afterwards, volunteers were asked to estimate the temperature in the room. Those who recalled memories of being ostracized experienced the ambient temperature of the room as colder. In a second experiment, researchers triggered feelings of exclusion by having volunteers play a computer-simulated ball tossing game. The game was designed so that some of the volunteers had the ball tossed to them many times, but others were left out. Afterwards, all the volunteers rated the desirability of certain foods and beverages: hot coffee, crackers, an ice-cold Coke, an apple, and hot soup. The findings were striking. As reported in the September issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, the "unpopular" volunteers who had been ostracized during the computer game were much more likely than the others to want either hot soup or hot coffee. Their preference for warm food and drinks presumably resulted from physically feeling cold as a result of being excluded. "It's striking that people preferred hot coffee and soup more when socially excluded," Leonardelli said. "Our research suggests that warm chicken soup may be a literal coping mechanism for social isolation."

" They take over a public park they didn't pay for, to go nearby to use bathrooms they didn't pay for, to beg for food from places they they don't want to pay for. Newt Gingrich"

What emoji do people use the most? That's the central question in a new study that looks at emoji use around the world. The company SwiftKey analyzed more than a billion pieces of emoji data, organized by language and country. According to SwiftKey's chief marketing officer, Joe Braidwood, the results were fascinating. Here's a sample of what researchers found: 1. 70 percent of all emojis sent are positive. 2. Canadians lead the charge in their use of money, violence, sports-related, raunchy, and even the poop emoji. 3. Americans are second behind Canada in their love of violent emojis, such as guns. But they also enjoy food emoji: pizza and the chicken drumstick are high-frequency. 4. Australians referenced drugs, alcohol, junk food and holidays much more than any other nation. 5. French really are hopeless romantics and use heart emojis four times more than anyone else. 6. Arabic speakers are big fans of the rose emoji, using it 10 times more than other language speakers. 7. Spanish-speaking Americans used sad faces more than any other language. "The most popular emoji that they used out of the sad faces was the crying emoji."

This article provide the most thoroughgoing analysis to date of how the income kitty - like paychecks, profit-sharing, fringe benefits and food stamps - is divided among the American population.

Researchers at Georgia State University's Language Research Center examined how two language-trained chimpanzees communicated with a human experimenter to find food. Their results are the most compelling evidence to date that primates can use gestures to coordinate actions in pursuit of a specific goal. Dr. Charles Menzel, a senior research scientist, notes, "The chimpanzees used gestures to recruit the assistance of an otherwise uninformed person and to direct the person to hidden objects 10 or more meters away...the findings illustrate the high level of intentionality chimpanzees are capable of, including their use of directional gestures. This study adds to our understanding of how well chimpanzees can remember and communicate about their environment."

I was surprised by this article and by the fact that sometimes, our seemingly boring moments in life has the potential to transform into a great college essay. This article made me change my views of college essays and reexamine what topics I want to write about.

I liked the ideas this essay shared because I realized that if I were to have written my college essay prior to reading this article, my essay would've been similar to the majority of students who submit college essays. This site stresses the importance of being different and that having humility, humor, and personal stories in college essays are attractive. But the article did imply that there are limits and that some things such as torturing animals and showing inconsideration to other people, are inappropriate.

It seems more common now for counselors and advisors to recommend writing about everyday things, but with our own personal "flair." So it was helpful to read in this article about how there are some negative everyday experiences that are important to leave out.

Research has shown that primates can produce unique calls for things or events in their environment, such as the arrival of a predator or discovery of high-quality food. Scientists had assumed that referential calls were innate and rigid among nonhuman primates, and not flexible and socially learned as they are among Homo sapiens. Yet, a recent study suggests that primates may, in fact, be able to engage in social learning, acquiring and using another group's sounds.

GENIE An Abused Child's Flight From Silence. By Russ Rymer. 221 pp. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. THE story of the girl known by the pseudonym Genie, who spent the first 13 years of her life locked in a bedroom alone, alternately strapped down to a child's potty chair or straitjacketed into a sleeping bag, fed on baby food and beaten with a wooden paddle when she so much as whimpered, is really three stories woven together.

We've all laughed at some horrible puns and made them as well! This article explores why English enables us to create word play and the extreme level to which people have taken it! For example, the pun masters of this world dubbed Gandhi as "a super calloused fragile mystic hexed by halitosis" for his barefoot and food fasting lifestyle. There are even competitions to show off your skill.

Similar to `ōlelo Hawai`i in Hawaii, the indigenous Maori language [te reo Maori] was banned in New Zealand schools for much of the 20th century. At the same time, many rural Maori were moving into the cities where they had to speak English. That meant that by the 1980s, only 20 percent of indigenous New Zealanders were fluent in the Maori language.That number was virtually unchanged by 2013. Government data that year showed that just 21.3 percent of the Maori population could have a conversation in te reo. An official government report published in 2010 warned the language was nearing extinction. Fortunately, in 2018, Maori is enjoying increased popularity among New Zealanders, Maori or otherwise, taking pride in their South Pacific nation's indigenous culture. Te reo Maori courses are booked out at community colleges, while bands, poets and rappers perform using the language. Te reo Maori words have entered people's everyday language. Examples include "kai" meaning food, "ka pai" meaning congratulations, and "whanau" meaning family. Even the way New Zealanders define themselves has taken on a te reo tone. An increasing number prefer to call their country "Aotearoa" rather than New Zealand.

Food for thought: " A few weeks ago, the world on my phone seemed more compelling than the offline world - more colorful, faster-moving and with a bigger scope of rewards. I still love that world, and probably always will. But now, the physical world excites me, too - the one that has room for boredom, idle hands and space for thinking. I no longer feel phantom buzzes in my pocket or have dreams about checking my Twitter replies. I look people in the eye and listen when they talk. I ride the elevator empty-handed. And when I get sucked into my phone, I notice and self-correct. It's not a full recovery, and I'll have to stay vigilant. But for the first time in a long time, I'm starting to feel like a human again."

For decades, scientists thought perhaps smell was a diminished human sense and less valuable than other senses - like our glorious eyesight. "In the West, people came to this conclusion [through] the fact that we don't seem to have a good ability to talk about smells," says Asifa Majid, a professor of language and cultural cognition at Radboud University in the Netherlands. But Majid found that isn't universally true. Certain language speakers can name odors as easily as English speakers name colors, and the key difference may be how they live. Majid worked with speakers of four different languages: English and three from the Malay Peninsula. Two of these languages, Semaq Beri and Jahai, are spoken by hunter-gatherer groups. The other one, Semelai, is spoken by farmers. In order to test the ability of these language speakers to classify odors, Majid and her colleagues gave asked them to smell pen-shaped contraptions each filled with a different scent like leather, orange, garlic or fish - and then asked them to identify the smell. She also asked the participants to identify colors using different color chips. The farmer Semelai, like English speakers, found colors relatively easy to name and agreed with one another that the red chips were, indeed, red. When it came to identifying odors, the Semelai failed as miserably as the English speakers on the same tests. But both hunter-gatherer groups were much better at naming smells than the Semelai. In fact, they were just as good at identifying smells as colors. "That says something about the hunter-gatherer lifestyle," Majid says. There's a scarcity of English words that objectively describe odors, Majid says. Given that, readers of this article - written in English - may wonder how it's possible to describe a smell without leaning on other senses like taste (words like "sweet" or "sour") or emotional words like "gross." In English, most of our attempts to describe smells come from individual sources. You

In this article, scientist Wilkie Freud followed a group of chimpanzees around to learn more about the origin of language. The human lineage broke from chimpanzees roughly 7.9 million years ago. The study they found was that the chimpanzees use language when necessary, like when a snake is seen. They will shout an alarm call to warn other about the danger. They also seem to grunt when they enjoy food. This shows how chimpanzees and humans have similar but very different types of language.