The following Mark's Daily Apple article was written by Marxist and is narrated by Brock Armstrong.

The power of words, how we talk about food.

Last month linguist Dan Jaravsky came out with a book called The Language of Food.

A linguist reads the menu.

In it, he explores everything from language choices that distinguish cheap restaurant menus

from more expensive ones, to the kind of vowels marketers use in naming food products. For example, short vowels for

crispy writs or cheese it's, or longer vowels for rich jamoka or almond fudge. In another

linguistically focused mindbender published last year, David Chen, a behavioral economist, found

the people who spoke a language

like English that was futureed, a language that includes a distinct future tense through the use

of helping verbs, for example, such as I will, blah, blah, blah. As a whole, saved less money and

practiced fewer lifestyle behaviors that supported future health

than societies whose languages don't have a future tense, generally collapsing it in with the

present tense as German does.

It's the kind of seemingly irrelevant detail that ultimately stuns in its demonstration of how subtle cultural and linguistic

patterns really do pervade our collective thinking and communication in ways we're wholly unaware of.

As Chen himself was quoted, why is it that we allow subtle nudges of our language to affect our

decision-making? If details as

understated as those mentioned can apparently hold sway over our thinking, what about the more

obvious blasts of influence? Regardless of your thoughts about the above research, clearly how we

talk about food affects our relationship to it. Sure, it works on a

societal level. Consider the common phrasing we're all exposed to every day, such as the snack

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