Read The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu for Free Online Page B

everything I’ve tried so far is DELICIOUS!!!!
     
    And here are bits of one negative review (a rating of 1 out of 5):
The bartender was either new or just absolutely horrible . . . we waited 10 min before we even got her attention to order . . . and then we had to wait 45—FORTY FIVE!—minutes for our entrees . . . Dessert was another 45 min. wait, followed by us having to stalk the waitress to get the check . . . he didn’t make eye contact or even break his stride to wait for a response . . . the chocolate soufflé was disappointing . . . I will not return.
     
    As eaters we use reviews to help decide where to eat (maybe give that second restaurant a miss), whether to buy a new book or see a movie. But as linguists we use these reviews for something altogether different: to help understand human nature. Reviews show humans at their most opinionated and honest, and the metaphors, emotions, and sentiment displayed in reviews are an important cue to human psychology.
    In a series of studies, my colleagues and I have employed the techniques of computational linguistics to examine these reviews. With Victor Chahuneau, Noah Smith, and Bryan Routledge from Carnegie Mellon University, my colleagues on the menu study of Chapter 1, I’ve investigated a million online restaurant reviews on Yelp, from seven cities (San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Boston, LA, Philadelphia, Washington), covering people’s impressions between about 2005 and 2011, the same cities and restaurants from our study of menus. With computer scientists Julian McAuley and Jure Leskovec , I looked at 5 million reviews written by thousands of reviewers on websites like BeerAdvocate for beers they drank from 2003 to 2011.
    As we’ll see, the way people talk about skunky beer, disappointing service, or amazing meals is a covert clue to universals of human language (like the human propensity for optimism and positive emotions and the difficulty of finding words to characterize smells), the metaphors we use in daily life (why drugs are a metaphor for some foods but sex is a metaphor for others), and the aspects of daily life that people find especially traumatizing.
    Let’s start with a simple question. What words are most associated with good reviews, or with bad reviews? To find out, we count how much more often a word occurs in good reviews than bad reviews (or conversely, more often in bad reviews than good reviews).
    Not surprisingly, good reviews (whether for restaurants or beer) are most associated with what are called positive emotional words or positive sentiment words . Here are some:
love delicious best amazing great favorite perfect excellent awesome wonderful fantastic incredible
     
    Bad reviews use negative emotional words or negative sentiment words:
horrible bad worst terrible awful disgusting bland gross mediocre tasteless sucks nasty dirty inedible yuck stale
     
    Words like horrible or terrible used to mean “inducing horror” or “inducing terror,” and awesome or wonderful meant “inducing awe” or “full of wonder.” But humans naturally exaggerate, and so over time people used these words in cases where there wasn’t actual terror or true wonder.
    The result is what we call semantic bleaching : the “awe” has been bleached out of the meaning of awesome . Semantic bleaching is pervasive with these emotional or affective words, even applying to verbslike “love.” Linguist and lexicographer Erin McKean notes that it was only recently, in the late 1800s, that young women began to generalize the word love from its romantic core sense to talk about their relationship to inanimate objects like food. As late as 1915 an older woman in L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of the Island complains about how exaggerated it was that young women applied the word to food:
The girls nowadays indulge in such exaggerated statements that one never can tell what they do mean. It wasn’t so in my young days. Then a girl did not say she loved turnips, in