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

by ArnoldoCornell Posted on September 29, 2014

Mother Jones

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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.”

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

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Don’t Believe the Crocodile Tears Over High Corporate Tax Rates

by AidenLoche Posted on August 19, 2014

Mother Jones

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The US corporate tax code is inefficient, distortive, and staggeringly complex. Almost no one defends it on those grounds. But US multinational corporations, who have recently been engaged in a wave of tax inversions, have a different complaint: our tax rates are just flatly too high. They make American corporations uncompetitive compared to their foreign peers, and that’s why they’re being forced to relocate their headquarters to other countries with lower tax rates.

Edward D. Kleinbard, a professor at the Gould School of Law at the University of Southern California and a former chief of staff to the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, says this is nonsense. Firms that are entirely (or almost entirely) domestic do indeed pay high corporate taxes. But multinationals don’t. Thanks to the “feast of tax planning opportunities laid out before them on the groaning board of corporate tax expenditures,” they mostly pay effective tax rates that aren’t much different from French or German companies. They are, in fact, perfectly competitive.

So why the recent binge of tax inversions?

The short answer is that the current mania for inversions is driven by U.S. firms’ increasingly desperate need to do something with their $1 trillion in offshore cash, and by a desire to reduce U.S. domestic tax burdens on U.S. domestic operating earnings.

The year 2004 is a good place to start, because that year’s corporate offshore cash tax amnesty (section 965) had a perfectly predictable knock-on effect, which was to convince corporate America that the one-time never to be repeated tax amnesty would inevitably be followed by additional tax amnesties, if only multinationals would opportune their legislators enough. The 2004 law thus created a massive incentive to accumulate as much permanently reinvested earnings in the form of cash as possible.

….The convergence of these two phenomena led to an explosion in stateless income strategies and in the total stockpile of U.S. multinationals’ permanently reinvested earnings. But U.S. multinationals are now hoist by their own petard. The best of the stateless income planners are now drowning in low-taxed overseas cash….It is less than a secret that firms in this position really have no intention at all of “permanently” reinvesting the cash overseas, but instead are counting the days until the money can be used to goose share prices through stock buy backs and dividends.

….The obvious solution from the perspective of the multinationals would have been a second, and then a third and fourth, one-time only repatriation holiday, but there are still hard feelings in Congress surrounding the differences between the representations made to legislators relating to how the cash from the first holiday would be used, and what in fact happened.

Indeed. Back in 2004, multinational corporations swore that if Congress granted them a tax amnesty to repatriate their foreign income into the United States, it would unleash a tsunami of new investment. Needless to say, that never happened. Corporate investment had never been credit-constrained in the first place. Instead, all that lovely cash was used mostly to goose stock prices via buy-backs and increased dividends. It’s no wonder that Congress is unwilling to repeat that fiasco.

Kleinbard’s paper is an interesting one, with a couple of fascinating case studies demolishing the self-serving ways that corporate CEOs try to blame the tax code for things that have nothing to do with it. Andrew Ross Sorkin has more here.

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Don’t Believe the Crocodile Tears Over High Corporate Tax Rates

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Invader Batters Rural America, Shrugging Off Herbicides

by Myrna Posted on August 11, 2014

A herbicide-resistant weed known as palmer amaranth or carelessweed has devastated Southern cotton fields and is poised to wreak havoc in the Midwest, partly because of farming practices. View article –  Invader Batters Rural America, Shrugging Off Herbicides ; ;Related ArticlesBy Degrees: In the Ocean, Clues to ChangeLook: Staking Out the Great White SharkHurricane Expected to Be First to Hit Hawaii in 22 Years ;

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Invader Batters Rural America, Shrugging Off Herbicides

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The Meltdown of the Anti-Immigration Minuteman Militia

by AntwanHockensmi Posted on August 4, 2014

Mother Jones

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In early July, Chris Davis issued a call to arms. “You see an illegal, you point your gun right dead at them, right between the eyes, and say ‘Get back across the border, or you will be shot,'” the Texas-based militia commander said in a YouTube video heralding Operation Secure Our Border-Laredo Sector, a plan to block the wave of undocumented migrants coming into his state. “If you get any flak from sheriffs, city, or feds, Border Patrol, tell them, ‘Look—this is our birthright. We have a right to secure our own land. This is our land.'”

Davis’ video was publicized by local newspapers and the Los Angeles Times. But the militia never materialized in Laredo, and Davis walked back his comments. (The video has been taken down.) Over the last few weeks, a smaller force under Davis’ watch has appeared along the southern border, spread thinly across three states. The fizzling of this grand mobilization was another reminder that the current immigration crisis has been missing a key ingredient of recent border showdowns: Bands of the heavily-armed self-appointed border guardians known as Minutemen.

During the past four years, the Minuteman groups that defined conservative immigration policy during the mid- to late-2000s have mostly self-destructed—sometimes spectacularly so. Founding Minuteman leaders are in prison, facing criminal charges, dead, or sidelined. “It really attracted a lot of people that had some pretty extreme issues,” says Juanita Molina, executive director of the Border Action Network, an advocacy group that provides aid to migrants in the desert. “We saw the movement implode on itself mostly because of that.” An analysis by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors right-wing extremist groups, found that the number of Minuteman groups in the Southwest had declined from 310 to 38 between 2010 and 2012.

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The Meltdown of the Anti-Immigration Minuteman Militia

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GOP Congressman Says Central America Too Dangerous for Congressmen—But Not for Kids

by LeonoraKwan Posted on July 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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Rep. Steve Pearce (R-N.M.), who spent the weekend visiting Honduras and Guatemala with six other members of Congress, reaffirmed his belief on Wednesday that the ongoing humanitarian crisis along the southern border is to send migrants home—even though he found his host city too dangerous to go outside.

Per the Santa Fe New Mexican:

Congressman Steve Pearce said Wednesday that most immigrants from Central America who are crossing illegally into the United States are driven by economic reasons, not fear of physical danger in their homeland.

…

Pearce said he and the rest of the House delegation that visited Honduras and Guatemala did not venture from their hotel very often because of the dangers, but the message they received in both countries was consistent: “Send back our children.”

So to recap: Tegucigalpa is too dangerous for grown members of Congress to leave their downtown hotel rooms, but a perfectly fine place to send an eight-year-old kid. (According to a press release, the congressional delegation did leave their hotel to visit an outreach center funded by the US government. They also met with the president and first lady of Honduras.) Meanwhile, not content with the results of Pearce’s investigation, a rival Congressional delegation, led by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), is en route to Central America now. We’ll see if they find it safe enough to walk around.

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GOP Congressman Says Central America Too Dangerous for Congressmen—But Not for Kids

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Scientists Are Beginning To Figure Out Why Conservatives Are…Conservative

by CarolEllington Posted on July 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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You could be forgiven for not having browsed yet through the latest issue of the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences. If you care about politics, though, you’ll find a punchline therein that is pretty extraordinary.

Behavioral and Brain Sciences employs a rather unique practice called “Open Peer Commentary”: An article of major significance is published, a large number of fellow scholars comment on it, and then the original author responds to all of them. The approach has many virtues, one of which being that it lets you see where a community of scholars and thinkers stand with respect to a controversial or provocative scientific idea. And in the latest issue of the journal, this process reveals the following conclusion: A large body of political scientists and political psychologists now concur that liberals and conservatives disagree about politics in part because they are different people at the level of personality, psychology, and even traits like physiology and genetics.

That’s a big deal. It challenges everything that we thought we knew about politics—upending the idea that we get our beliefs solely from our upbringing, from our friends and families, from our personal economic interests; and calling into question the notion that in politics, we can really change (most of us, anyway).

The occasion of this revelation is a paper by John Hibbing of the University of Nebraska and his colleagues, arguing that political conservatives have a “negativity bias,” meaning that they are physiologically more attuned to negative (threatening, disgusting) stimuli in their environments. In the process, Hibbing et al. marshall a large body of evidence, including their own experiments using eye trackers and other devices to measure the involuntary responses of political partisans to different types of images. One finding? That conservatives respond much more rapidly to threatening and aversive stimuli (for instance, images of “a very large spider on the face of a frightened person, a dazed individual with a bloody face, and an open wound with maggots in it,” as one of their papers put it.)

In other words, the conservative ideology, and especially one of its major facets—centered on a strong military, tough law enforcement, resistance to immigration, widespread availability of guns—would seem well tailored for an underlying, threat-oriented biology.

The authors go on to speculate that this ultimately reflects an evolutionary imperative. “One possibility,” they write, “is that a strong negativity bias was extremely useful in the Pleistocene,” when it would have been super helpful in preventing you from getting killed. (The Pleistocene epoch lasted from roughly 2.5 million years ago until 12 thousand years ago.) We had John Hibbing on the Inquiring Minds podcast earlier this year, where he discussed these ideas in depth; you can listen here:

Hibbing and his colleagues make an intriguing argument in their latest paper, but what’s truly fascinating is what happened next. Twenty-six different scholars or groups of scholars then got an opportunity to tee off on the paper, firing off a variety of responses. But as Hibbing and colleagues note in their final reply, out of those responses, “22 or 23 accept the general idea” of a conservative negativity bias, and simply add commentary to aid in the process of “modifying it, expanding on it, specifying where it does and does not work,” and so on. Only about three scholars or groups of scholars seem to reject the idea entirely.

That’s pretty extraordinary, when you think about it. After all, one of the teams of commenters includes New York University social psychologist John Jost, who drew considerable political ire in 2003 when he and his colleagues published a synthesis of existing psychological studies on ideology, suggesting that conservatives are characterized by traits such as a need for certainty and an intolerance of ambiguity. Now, writing in Behavioral and Brain Sciences in response to Hibbing roughly a decade later, Jost and fellow scholars note that

There is by now evidence from a variety of laboratories around the world using a variety of methodological techniques leading to the virtually inescapable conclusion that the cognitive-motivational styles of leftists and rightists are quite different. This research consistently finds that conservatism is positively associated with heightened epistemic concerns for order, structure, closure, certainty, consistency, simplicity, and familiarity, as well as existential concerns such as perceptions of danger, sensitivity to threat, and death anxiety. Italics added

Back in 2003, Jost and his team were blasted by Ann Coulter, George Will, and National Review for saying this; congressional Republicans began probing into their research grants; and they got lots of hate mail. But what’s clear is that today, they’ve more or less triumphed. They won a field of converts to their view and sparked a wave of new research, including the work of Hibbing and his team.

Granted, there are still many issues yet to be worked out in the science of ideology. Most of the commentaries on the new Hibbing paper are focused on important but non-paradigm shifting side issues, such as the question of how conservatives can have a higher negativity bias, and yet not have neurotic personalities. (Actually, if anything, the research suggests that liberals may be the more neurotic bunch.) Indeed, conservatives tend to have a high degree of happiness and life satisfaction. But Hibbing and colleagues find no contradiction here. Instead, they paraphrase two other scholarly commentators (Matt Motyl of the University of Virginia and Ravi Iyer of the University of Southern California), who note that “successfully monitoring and attending negative features of the environment, as conservatives tend to do, may be just the sort of tractable task…that is more likely to lead to a fulfilling and happy life than is a constant search for new experience after new experience.”

All of this matters, of course, because we still operate in politics and in media as if minds can be changed by the best honed arguments, the most compelling facts. And yet if our political opponents are simply perceiving the world differently, that idea starts to crumble. Out of the rubble just might arise a better way of acting in politics that leads to less dysfunction and less gridlock…thanks to science.

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Scientists Are Beginning To Figure Out Why Conservatives Are…Conservative

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Summer School for Anchovies

by Myrna Posted on July 11, 2014

Oceanographers have noted a billion-strong anchovy swarm near Southern California, a remarkably large example of a fish gathering. View original: Summer School for Anchovies ; ;Related ArticlesEconomic Scene: Blueprints for Taming the Climate CrisisDot Earth Blog: The Good, the Bad and the Anthropocene (Age of Us)A California Oil Field Yields Another Prized Commodity ;

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Summer School for Anchovies

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Migrant Kids Need a Good Lawyer. But Who’s Gonna Pay?

by LakeshaBabin Posted on July 9, 2014

Mother Jones

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As the Obama administration continues to grapple with the humanitarian crisis surrounding unaccompanied immigrant children, some have suggested processing the children faster and moving them quickly through the immigration courts. One problem: The vast majority don’t have lawyers. The ACLU and several other groups, including the American Immigration Council, filed a lawsuit Wednesday to force the government to provide these kids with counsel as they deal with the wildly complex immigration system.

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


4 Reasons Why Border Agents Shouldn’t Get to Decide Whether Child Migrants Can Stay in the US

The ACLU’s suit represents eight children, ages 10 to 17, from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Mexico, but is also trying to force representation for the thousands of children who go through the same thing each year. The suit alleges that the children are being deprived of due process, citing previous case law ruling that children should have legal representation in legal matters. A 2014 report (PDF) from the University of California-Hastings and Kids in Need of Defense argues, “Without counsel, the children are unlikely to understand the complex procedures they face and the options and remedies that may be available to them under the law.”

Part of Obama’s $3.7 billion plan to address immigration issues is to provide $15 million to fund legal representation for unaccompanied children. (Notably, a 2012 report said that 40 percent of them were eligible for some sort of deportation relief.) The government says it’s also trying to recruit lawyers and paralegals to help these children, but according to Ahilan Arulanantham, the deputy legal director of the ACLU of Southern California and the senior staff attorney for the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, “it’s pretty clear that it’s not enough.”

“Obviously, we’re happy the government is trying to do more, but this is entirely within government control,” Arulanantham says. “These are complex cases, and the question at the core isn’t about money. The question is about whether it’s fair to have them present their cases on their own.”

US Attorney General Eric Holder—a named defendant in the case—seems to agree, saying in March 2013 that it is “inexcusable that young kids…six-, seven-year-olds, 14-year-olds—have immigration decisions made on their behalf, against them…and they’re not represented by counsel.” More than a year later, though, unaccompanied kids still struggle to find pro bono legal representation, either because they and their families can’t afford it or there is simply none available.

One child mentioned in the complaint, a 10-year-old boy from El Salvador, watched his father get killed by gang members in front of his house, and was threatened by that same gang a few years later at the age of nine. Another, a 14-year-old girl from El Salvador, was also threatened by gang members after her uncle, a police officer, refused to supply gang members with supplies.

“I wish we could have a judge or a government attorney question her about her case and about how immigration law works,” Arulanantham says. “It’s laughable.”

Read the full complaint below:

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Unaccompanied children lawsuit ACLU (PDF)

Unaccompanied children lawsuit ACLU (Text)

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Migrant Kids Need a Good Lawyer. But Who’s Gonna Pay?

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New Conservative Meme: Migrant Children Aren’t Children

by LouisDossett Posted on July 8, 2014

Mother Jones

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Conservatives have found a new line of attack on the ongoing refugee crisis along the southern border: The children who are migrating en masse from Central America and crowding into detention centers are not children.

“I realize that in Barack Obama’s America we now classify anyone under the age of 26 as a child eligible for their parent’s healthcare insurance,” writes Red State‘s Erick Erickson. “But I’m pretty sure a normal person would not classify these men as children.” He links to this tweet:

Erickson’s analysis is correct—the people in this photo are not children. The way immigration detention works is that children are separated from adults and then sorted by age and gender. This is noted in nearly every single story on the subject. Just because more than 48,000 minors have been detained crossing the border in 2014 doesn’t mean adults have simply stopped coming over.

Lest you think that the administration is inventing this influx of young migrants, here is a photo of migrant children crowded into a single room. I found it on Breitbart:

Big Government

You could also read my colleague Ian Gordon’s wrenching story for the magazine on 17-year-old Adrián’s flight from Guatemala City to the United States.

Link:

New Conservative Meme: Migrant Children Aren’t Children

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The Incredible Thing About Whale Poop Is That It Fights Climate Change

by AleidaXloxni Posted on July 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared in CityLab and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

It’s not a good time to be living in the ocean. Aside from oil spills and the scourge of plastics pollution, the seas are becoming ever more acidic due to humanity’s CO2 flooding the atmosphere. The altered PH of the water makes for a bevy of problems, from making fish act in really weird ways to dissolving the shells of creatures critical to the marine food chain.

But a group of scientists from the University of Vermont and elsewhere think the ocean’s future health has one thing going for it: the restoration of whale populations. They believe that having more whales in the water creates a more stable marine environment, partly through something called a “whale pump”—a polite term for how these majestic animals defecate.

Commercial hunting of great whales, meaning the baleen and sperm variety, led to a decline in their numbers as high as 66 percent to 90 percent, the scientists write in a new study in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. This mammalian decimation “likely altered the structure and function of the oceans,” says lead author Joe Roman, “but recovery is possible and in many cases is already under way.”

The researchers—who are whale biologists—present a couple of arguments for how these animals help secure the climate-threatened ocean. The first is their bathroom behavior: After feeding on krill in the briny deep, whales head back to the surface to take massive No. 2s. You can see the “pumping” process in action amid this group of sperm whales off the coast of Sri Lanka:

Tony Wu/University of Vermont

You have to feel for the person who took that photo. But these “flocculent fecal plumes” happen to be laden with nutrients and are widely consumed by plankton, which in turn takes away carbon from the atmosphere when they photosynthesize, die, and wind up on the ocean floor. A previous study of the Southern Ocean, to cite just one example, indicated that sperm-whale defecation might remove hundreds of thousands of tons of atmospheric carbon each year by enhancing such plankton growth. Thus, these large whales “may help to buffer marine ecosystems from destabilizing stresses” like warmer temperatures and acidification, the researchers claim.

The other nice thing whales do for the climate is eat tons of food and then die. In life, they are fantastic predators. But in death, their swollen bodies are huge sarcophagi for carbon. When the Grim Reaper comes calling, whales sink and sequester lots and lots of carbon at the bottom of the sea, like this dearly departed fellow:

Craig Smith/University of Vermont

While there’s no exact measurement of how these “whale falls” impact global carbon sequestration—and some argue it can’t have that big of an effect—Roman thinks it’s worth keeping in mind when thinking about protecting these vulnerable creatures. As he told an Alaskan news station last year, “This may be a way of mitigating climate change, if we can restore whale populations throughout the world.”

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The Incredible Thing About Whale Poop Is That It Fights Climate Change

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