Tag Archives: latin

The Creepy Language Tricks Taco Bell Uses to Fool People Into Eating There

by ArnoldoCornell Posted on September 29, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

What can you tell about a restaurant from its menu? A lot more than what’s cooking. That’s what linguist Dan Jurafsky reveals in his new book, The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu.

Dan Jurafsky Photo by Kingmond Young

Jurafsky, a professor of linguistics at Stanford University, looked at hundreds of examples of food language—from menus to marketing materials to restaurant reviews. Along the way, he uncovered some fascinating patterns. For example: In naming foods, he explains, marketers often appeal to the associations that we already have with certain sounds. Crackers and other crispy foods tend to have names with short, front-of-the-mouth vowels (Ritz, Cheez-Its, Triscuits) while rich and heavy foods have longer vowels that we form in the back of our mouth (Rocky Road, Jamoca Almond Fudge). He also describes the shared linguistic heritage of some of the most common food words. Take salad, sauce, slaw, and salsa: All come from the Latin word sal, meaning “salted.”

But it’s Jurafsky’s menu analysis that really stands out. Where most of us see simply a list of dishes, Jurafsky identifies subtle indicators of the image that a restaurant is trying to project—and which customers it wants to lure in. I asked Jurafsky to examine the menus of Taco Bell and its new upscale spinoff, US Taco Co., whose first location just opened in Southern California.

We started with Taco Bell’s breakfast menu. Of course, everyone knows that the Tex-Mex fast food chain isn’t exactly fine dining, but Jurafsky pointed to some hidden hallmarks of down-market eateries’ menus.

The first thing that Jurafsky noticed about Taco Bell’s menu was its size: There are dozens, if not hundreds of items. “The very, very fancy restaurants, many of them have no menu at all,” says Jurafsky. “The waiter tells you what you’re going to eat, kind of. If you want, they’ll email you a menu if you really want it.”

Next, Jurafsky picked up on descriptors. “So there’s all of those adjectives and participles,” he says. “Fluffy.” “Seasoned.” That’s one thing that’s common on cheaper restaurant menus—as if the restaurant feels the need to try and convince its diners of the quality of the food. A fancier restaurant, he explains, would take it as a given that the diner expects the eggs to be fluffy and the pico de gallo to be freshly prepared.

“Notice the word ‘flavorful,’” says Jurafsky. “The cheapest restaurants use these vague, positive adjectives. Delicious. Tasty. Scrumptious. Wonderful. Again, more expensive restaurants take all that as a given.”

“The description specifies ‘real cheddar cheese.’ Just like all the other adjectives, ‘real’ tells you that they think customers are assuming that the cheese is not real, so they have to tell you that it is.” Also, note that the word “jalapeño” is missing its tilde—the little squiggle over the “n” that signifies a “nye” pronunciation in Spanish words. Jurafsky isn’t sure whether the missing “ñ” is linguistically meaningful, but keep it in mind, because it will become important when we look at US Taco Co.’s menu.

The words “double portion” and “lots” are also typical on the menus of cheap restaurants,” says Jurafsky. “They want you to know you’re getting enough food for your money.”

Next, we turned to US Taco Co.:

“This is a hipster menu,” says Jurafsky. “This isn’t a linguistics thing, but there’s a Day of the Dead skull on top and the desserts are served in mason jars. I mean, how hipster can you get?”

Let’s take a closer look at some of the menu items:

“What the really upscale restaurants these days are doing is just listing their ingredients. They don’t say “and” or “with.” It’s just a list. They’re also using non-standard capitalization, everything lower case or everything upper case, for example. Here they’re making everything upper case. On the Taco Bell menu, they used standard capitalization.”

Also, in “Wanna Get Lei’d” there’s a reference to sex. Jurafsky explains that we often use sex metaphors to talk about fancy food, while for cheaper food, the metaphor of choice is often drugs. “The wings are addictive, or the chocolate must have crack,” he says. “There’s something about inexpensive foods that make us feel guilty. Talking about it in terms of drugs lets us put the responsibility on the food, not on ourselves.”

“There are more unusual Spanish words on this menu,” says Jurafsky. Taco Bell has “burrito” and “taco.” Everyone knows those. But “here we have ‘molcajete’ and ‘cotija.’ Every item has at least one Spanish word. And there’s the “ñ” in jalapeño! For Taco Bell, there might be tension between English and Spanish. In a hipster place, it’s okay to be authentic.”

Of course, says Jurafsky, language trends are always evolving. What we consider hipster menu language now is not the same as it was a few decades ago. In his book, Jurafsky notes that for most of the last century, trendy restaurants used French words to signify their status (think au jus, a la mode, and sur le plat). To the modern ear, these sound pretentious. Today’s fashionable restaurant menus have replaced French phrases with “carefully selected obscure food words and pastoral images of green pastures and heirloom vegetables,” he writes. That is, “if they offer you a menu at all.”

From:

The Creepy Language Tricks Taco Bell Uses to Fool People Into Eating There

Posted in alo, Anchor, Everyone, FF, G & F, GE, Green Pasture, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Creepy Language Tricks Taco Bell Uses to Fool People Into Eating There

Mexican Government: Freight Trains Are Now Off-Limits to Central American Migrants

by JeniferToledo Posted on July 12, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

On Thursday, a freight train derailed in southern Mexico. It wasn’t just any train, though: It was La Bestia—”the Beast”—the infamous train many Central American immigrants ride through Mexico on their way to the United States. When the Beast went off the tracks this week, some 1,300 people who’d been riding on top were stranded in Oaxaca.

How do 1,300 people fit on a cargo train, you ask? By crowding on like this:

Central Americans on the Beast, June 20 Rebecca Blackwell/AP

After years of turning a blind eye to what’s happening on La Bestia, the Mexican government claims it now will try to keep migrants off the trains. On Friday, Mexican Interior Secretary Miguel Ángel Osorio Chong said in a radio interview that the time had come to bring order to the rails. “We can’t keep letting them put their lives in danger,” he said. “It’s our responsibility once in our territory. The Beast is for cargo, not passengers.”

More MoJo coverage of the surge of unaccompanied child migrants from Central America.


70,000 Kids Will Show Up Alone at Our Border This Year. What Happens to Them?


What’s Next for the Children We Deport?


This Is Where the Government Houses the Tens of Thousands of Kids Who Get Caught Crossing the Border


Map: These Are the Places Central American Child Migrants Are Fleeing


“In Texas, We Don’t Turn Our Back on Children”

The announcement comes on the heels of President Obama’s $3.7 billion emergency appropriations request to deal with the ongoing surge of unaccompanied Central American child migrants arriving at the US-Mexico border. Many Central Americans take the trains to avoid checkpoints throughout Mexico—and the robbers and kidnappers known to prey on migrants. But riding the Beast can be even more perilous. Migrants often must bribe the gangs running the train to board, and even then, the dangers are obvious: Many riders have died falling off the train, or lost limbs after getting caught by its slicing wheels.

Why, though, hasn’t the Mexican government cracked down sooner? Adam Isacson, a regional-security expert at the nonprofit Washington Office on Latin America, says the responsibility of guarding the trains often has fallen to the rail companies—who usually turn around and argue that since the tracks are on government land, it should be the feds’ problem. (Notably, the train line’s concession is explicitly for freight, not passengers.)

In his radio interview, Osorio Chang also signaled a tougher stance against Central American migrants, in general. “Those who don’t have a visa to move through our country,” he said, “will be returned.”

For more of Mother Jones‘ reporting on unaccompanied child migrants, see all of our latest coverage here.

Continued: 

Mexican Government: Freight Trains Are Now Off-Limits to Central American Migrants

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta, Vintage | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Mexican Government: Freight Trains Are Now Off-Limits to Central American Migrants

Map: These Are the Places Central American Child Migrants Are Fleeing

by Tamera0164 Posted on June 27, 2014

Mother Jones

A recently produced infographic from the Department of Homeland Security shows that the majority of unaccompanied children coming to the United States are from some of the most violent and impoverished parts of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.

The map documents the origins of child migrants apprehended by the Border Patrol from January 1 to May 14. It was made public by Adam Isaacson of the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights organization, and it includes the following analysis about the surge in child migrants:

…Many Guatemalan children come from rural areas, indicating that they are probably seeking economic opportunities in the US. Salvadoran and Honduran children, on the other hand, come from extremely violent regions where they probably perceive the risk of traveling alone to the US preferable to remaining at home.

This echoes what I found in my yearlong investigation into the explosion of unaccompanied child migrants arriving to the United States. As I wrote in the July/August issue of Mother Jones:

Although some have traveled from as far away as Sri Lanka and Tanzania, the bulk are minors from Mexico and from Central America’s so-called Northern Triangle—Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, which together account for 74 percent of the surge. Long plagued by instability and unrest, these countries have grown especially dangerous in recent years: Honduras imploded following a military coup in 2009 and now has the world’s highest murder rate. El Salvador has the second-highest, despite the 2012 gang truce between Mara Salvatrucha and Barrio 18. Guatemala, new territory for the Zetas cartel, has the fifth-highest murder rate; meanwhile, the cost of tortillas has doubled as corn prices have skyrocketed due to increased American ethanol production (Guatemala imports half of its corn) and the conversion of farmland to sugarcane and oil palm for biofuel.

Below is a more granular look at where kids are coming from, also produced by DHS. San Pedro Sula, the world’s most violent city, was home to the largest number of child migrants caught by the Border Patrol (more than 2,500). Honduras’ capital, Tegucigalpa, sent the second-most kids, fewer than 1,000.

Visit source:

Map: These Are the Places Central American Child Migrants Are Fleeing

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Map: These Are the Places Central American Child Migrants Are Fleeing

Has This Chilean Architect Figured Out How To Fix Slums?

by NovellaSvm Posted on June 11, 2014

Mother Jones

In the United States, we tend to think of the suburbs as the historic domain of the middle class. It’s where the boomers went after fleeing the cities to accommodate their growing families (although the demographics of the suburbs are now changing).

But in Latin America, urban peripheries are less commonly populated by leafy suburbs for the rich than by slums for the poor. These shantytowns typically lack basic infrastructure like paved roads, sewers, and tap water. Living far from the city, residents are often forced to make long and expensive commutes.

But in the medium-sized Chilean port city of Iquique, one architect, Alejandro Aravena, had a solution: partial houses, located at the center of town, equipped with only the barest necessities—and space for residents to build on, bit by bit, as they can afford it.

When they were first built fourteen years ago for about 100 families, Aravena’s flagship projects, called the Quinta Monroy Houses, came with all the core necessities—a roof, a bathroom, a kitchen. With a little more than 300 square feet in floor space to start with, the houses were 25 percent smaller than the average public housing unit in Chile, but with an extra-wide foundation, residents had plenty of room to expand.

In his new book, Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture, journalist Justin McGuirk writes that when Aravena first launched the project through his firm, Elemental, a number of critics were appalled. They argued that the government should provide complete houses, since incomplete houses require the occupant to perform manual labor. But where some saw a failure in the making, others welcomed change. In the 1970’s, under Chile’s socialist president Salvador Allende, the government prioritized building completed public housing, even enlisting a Soviet-made pre-fabricated house factory for the job. But despite the initial gusto, the government quickly ran out of the resources to continue. In three years, the slum population rose more than 130 percent.

Since the Allende period, the government has shifted to a hybrid market-government approach, giving subsidies to the poor to buy houses and land. At the time Aravena built Quinta Monroy, the government offered $7,500 per family—usually too little to buy a complete house, but just enough to make Aravena’s stripped-down models affordable.

As residents expanded their houses, their value grew. One study (PDF), sponsored by the Finnish government, found that in its first two years, Quinta Monroy’s 100 families had made an average of $750 in improvements per unit, doubling the size of their homes and raising the houses’ value to an estimated $20,000 each. One six-year resident McGuirk speaks with says that after the subsidy, he spent just $400 of his own money to buy a basic Quinta Monroy house. But after saving up and adding four bedrooms and an extra bathroom, he estimates he has increased the value of his home to $50,000.

The Quinta Monroy houses before residents doubled their size with their own improvements Cristóbal Palma/Verso Books

It’s hard to see a plan like this taking off in the United States, given our long permitting processes and strict building codes. And even in Iquique, some of the half-houses look similar to the shantytowns they were designed to replace: While some residents have transformed their homes into elegant structures with balconies and trim, “other add-ons look like slum shacks wedged between concrete houses,” McGuirk says.

Still, other countries see promise in Aravena’s idea. Already, Elemental has built and sold hundreds of half-houses in Chile, and it’s testing the idea in Mexico, Guatemala, and Peru. “These are places where Aravena can still make a difference,” McGuirk says.

See the original article here: 

Has This Chilean Architect Figured Out How To Fix Slums?

Posted in Anchor, Citizen, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Paradise, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Has This Chilean Architect Figured Out How To Fix Slums?

Cow farts still stink up the climate — but relief is possible

by Mstyslava7ju Posted on September 26, 2013

Cow farts still stink up the climate — but relief is possible

By

Shutterstock

There’s your biggest problem right there.

The latest official estimate of the extraordinary role that livestock-rearing plays in global warming comes with a glimmer of hope: Switching over to established best practices could slash the sector’s emissions by a third.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations caused an international stir when it estimated in 2006 that livestock contributed 18 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. Some critics derided the claim, saying T-bones and Big Macs couldn’t possibly be so bad. The FAO has since updated its numbers, checked its facts and performed new calculations based on newer standards. The latest conclusion is little different from the earlier one: Livestock contributes 16.5 percent of worldwide emissions.

Flatulent, manure-dropping cows are by far the largest contributors to the problem. Beef production is responsible for 41 percent of the sector’s emissions, and dairy farming can be blamed for 19 percent. Pig meat, poultry meat, and eggs are responsible for a little less than 10 percent apiece.

Why are cows so harsh on the climate? The same reason Auntie Flora doesn’t get invited to parties: Because they belch and fart so damned much. Only the FAO doesn’t say it like that. Rather, it blames the “enteric fermentation” of cattle and the methane that bovine rumination produces for 39 percent of the livestock industry’s emissions.

The news is bleak, it’s true, but at least there is this, from the FAO’s summary of its report:

Wider adoption of existing best practices and technologies in feeding, health and husbandry, and manure management — as well as greater use of currently underutilized technologies such as biogas generators and energy-saving devices — could help the global livestock sector cut its outputs of global warming gases as much as 30 percent by becoming more efficient and reducing energy waste.

The Guardian reports that reducing greenhouse gas emissions wouldn’t just be good for the climate — it would be good for the businesses and communities that farm the animals:

Specifically, the FAO said better-quality feed, improved breeding and good animal health helped to shrink the unproductive part of the herd. Many of the actions the FAO recommended to improve efficiency and reduce greenhouse gas emissions would also boost production. This would provide people with more food and higher incomes. Livestock rearing supports hundreds of millions of people and represents an increasingly important source of protein in many regions that have long struggled with chronic hunger and malnutrition. …

The greatest potential for cuts in emissions are in low-productivity livestock systems in south Asia, Latin America and Africa. However, in developed countries, where emission intensities are relatively low but the overall volume of production and therefore emissions is high, the FAO said even small decreases in intensity could add up to significant gains.

And if you aren’t a farmer, you can still make a difference by cutting back on your meat consumption. Taking part in meatless Monday wouldn’t just slow global warming; it would drive some retrograde politicians insane with wildly misplaced rage.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Climate & Energy

,

Food

Continue reading:

Cow farts still stink up the climate — but relief is possible

Posted in ALPHA, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, ONA, Oster, solar, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Cow farts still stink up the climate — but relief is possible

Americans are more worried about North Korean nukes than climate change

by Andrew Karolitz Posted on June 28, 2013

Americans are more worried about North Korean nukes than climate change

By John Upton

AAAARRRRGGGHHHH North Korea and nuclear bombs and other countries and stuff!!!!

Americans are less concerned about this climate change thing than other people around the world.

The Pew Research Group this week released the results of a worldwide survey of 37,653 residents of 39 countries, revealing that just 40 percent of Americans view global warming as a major threat to their country.

Across all countries surveyed, by comparison, 54 percent view global warming as a major threat. Concern was highest in Latin America and lowest in the U.S., with concern among Middle East residents nearly as low as those in America.

From the survey’s findings:

Concern about global climate change is particularly prevalent in Latin America, Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Asian/Pacific region, but majorities in Lebanon, Tunisia and Canada also say climate change is a major threat to their countries. In contrast, Americans are relatively unconcerned about global climate change. Four-in-ten say this poses a major threat to their nation, making Americans among the least concerned about this issue of the 39 publics surveyed, along with people in China, Czech Republic, Jordan, Israel, Egypt and Pakistan.

It’s not that Americans aren’t sitting around worrying about stuff. We’re plenty worried. But what’s keeping us up at night is Islamic extremist groups, nukes in North Korea and Iran, and the growth of China’s power and influence.

Here is a summary of the survey results:

Pew Research Global Attitudes Project

Click to embiggen.

Is it weird that we’re more worried about North Korea than about global climate change? Oh well, at least we’re more likely to fret about climate change than about America’s power and influence.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Climate & Energy

,

Politics

Also in Grist

Please enable JavaScript to see recommended stories

Source article: 

Americans are more worried about North Korean nukes than climate change

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, global climate change, LG, ONA, solar, solar panels, solar power, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Americans are more worried about North Korean nukes than climate change

Winter storm ‘Draco’ will solve, cause many problems

by biglermyrta910 Posted on December 19, 2012

Winter storm ‘Draco’ will solve, cause many problems

By Philip Bump

I guess “draco” is the word for “dragon” in Latin. I didn’t know that, despite Mrs. Marino spending two years teaching me the language in high school. (We got to choose our own Latin names; I chose “Aesculapius,” because I was a dork.) (“Was.”)

Draco is also the name for the giant winter storm dropping snow over the Midwest. See if you can spot it on this map. If you know where the Midwest is, it should be easy.

NOAA

This is good news, for a reason that you might not expect: It’s precipitation in a region desiccated by drought. As we mentioned last week, cities across the region have been setting new records for days without snow. A lot of those records are about to end.

From Weather Underground:

Blizzard warnings are posted over portions of Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa, Illinois, and Wisconsin, and snowfall amounts of up to a foot are expected in some of the affected regions. While the heavy snow will create dangerous travel conditions, the .5″ – 1.5″ of melted water equivalent from the the storm will provide welcome moisture for drought-parched areas of the Midwest. Though much of the moisture will stay locked up as snow for the rest of the year, runoff from the storm may help keep Lake Michigan and Huron from setting an all-time record low for the month of December, and may also keep the Mississippi River at St. Louis above the -5′ stage though the end of December.

That Mississippi River point is big; it has been at risk of having to halt shipping traffic due to low water levels. The storm also means that some areas may see a white Christmas, if the snow sticks around. (This latter point is less important than the Mississippi River.)

Draco’s wintry breath isn’t being felt everywhere. Washington, D.C., has been 7.5 degrees above normal on average so far this month. In Texas?

Lubbock, in west Texas, had a storm of its own.

So Draco is the exception for this warm, dry month. But none of that is the point of this article. The point of this article is: If you were going to name a potentially massive, powerful storm something, why on Earth would you choose Draco over Drago?

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

Read more:

Cities

,

Climate & Energy

Also in Grist

Please enable JavaScript to see recommended stories

Link: 

Winter storm ‘Draco’ will solve, cause many problems

Posted in GE, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Winter storm ‘Draco’ will solve, cause many problems