Language of Food for Linguistic Pleasure

Show #116 | Guest: Author Dan Jurafsky, Professor and Chair of Linguistics and Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University. He is the recipient of a 2002 MacArthur Fellowship, is the co-author with Jim Martin of the widely-used textbook "Speech and Language Processing", and co-created with Chris Manning one of the first massively open online courses, Stanford's course in Natural Language Processing. His new trade book "The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu" came out on September 15, 2014, and was a finalist for the 2015 James Beard Award. Dan was born in New York and grew up in California. He lives with his wife Janet in the Bernal Heights neighborhood of San Francisco. | Show Summary: In The Language of Food, Stanford University professor and MacArthur Fellow Dan Jurafsky peels away the mysteries from the foods we think we know. Why do we eat toast for breakfast, and then toast to good health at dinner? What does the turkey we eat on Thanksgiving have to do with the country on the eastern Mediterranean? Can you figure out how much your dinner will cost by counting the words on the menu?