Restaurant menus can be a source of much joy to pedants - that is, if you are the sort of pedant who enjoys a sudden spike in blood pressure. There are deserts to cross, extra apostrophes to swing from and unnecessary adjectives aplenty. Translated menus often yield the finest treasures. In my precious collection are "shitcake mushrooms", "chilly prowns", "tender lion" and the wrong-on-all-levels "pork jew" (they meant jus). However funny they may be, it isn't fair to sneer at such oddities because they are purely a result of not being proficient in English.Less forgivable perhaps is the insidious form of language used by restaurateurs trying to bamboozle their clients. Stanford University professor Dan Jurafsky has written a book called The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu. He says he can tell what financial bracket a restaurant occupies simply by looking at the menu - not the prices, nor the quality of paper, nor even the spelling (fancy places can be the worst offenders), but the phrasing."Expensive restaurants are 15 times more likely to tell you where the food comes from - to mention the grass-fed things or the name of the farm," says Jurafsky. They also use obscure words and tend to contain fewer items than the much longer menus in mid-priced establishments, which he says are "stuffed with adjectives like fresh, rich, mild, crisp, tender and golden brown".story_article_left1According to Jurafsky - and my subsequent research supports this - the cheapest restaurants use emotional words such as "delicious" and "tasty", as well as declarations that the food can be served any way you want it. Expensive restaurants don't feel the need to point out that their ingredients are fresh, and you wouldn't catch a chef at a top-class eatery (a word I loathe, but there are only so many times one can say "restaurant" in a sentence) handing culinary decisions over to the customer.Menus are but one branch of Jurafsky's research. He also investigated how we are spoken to by potato chips, or crisps, as they are called in some parts. On this he collaborated with a student called Josh Freedman, who "became interested in how the language of food advertising reflects socioeconomic class".In comparing the wording on differently priced bags of chips, they found that "health-related claims occur on expensive chips six times as often as on inexpensive chips". There was no difference in the healthy properties of any of the chips - none, for example, contained trans fats - but the expensive chips talked about health a lot more."Expensive chips also turn out to be much more natural," Jurafsky wrote, tongue-in-chip-filled-cheek. The pricey bags were 2.5 times more likely to use words such as "real" and "nothing artificial". Expensive chips were also more likely to invent points of difference by calling themselves better, lighter, crunchier, healthier, classier ... anything but cheaper.story_article_right2All this once again proves the power of words. Not only can they bring down statues and influence the crisps we choose to shove down our gullets, when properly cooked the language of food can become a smorgasbord of rich and crispy insults.Take the speech given by Kent to Oswald in Shakespeare's King Lear (thank you, Jenny Hobbs), which remains as fresh as the day it was baked. It contains more than two dozen of the finest insults, one of which is "an eater of broken meats", meaning a person who cannot afford to eat in even a restaurant that uses "tasty" on the menu, but has to salvage the scraps from another's plate.More commonplace insults abound in modern times. Ever been called a 'nana, a silly sausage or a couch potato? Life can be a lemon when you can't think of a suitably insulting foodstuff to fling back at the person who called you a doughnut, but don't let it get you down: just blow a raspberry.E-mail your observations on words and language to Sue de Groot on degroots@sundaytimes.co.za or follow her on Twitter @deGrootS1...