Emmet Reads

Dan Jurafsky, a Stanford linguist who blogs on The Language of Food, recently performed a ‘breakfast experiment’ on 81 ice cream flavors and 592 cracker brands. He found that the ice cream names tended to employ back vowels—sounds formed in the back of our mouths that generally refer to big, fat, heavy things. Front vowels, on the other hand, tend to be used in words that refer to small, thin, light foods, like crackers.

Say them out loud: rocky road, chocolate, cookie dough, coconut—heavy on low-frequency o’s. Now listen to Cheese Nips, Cheez-Its, Wheat Thins, Ritz Bits, Triscuit, Cheese Crisps—you can hear all those little bitty e’s and i’s.

These things matter. Sound symbolism appears to be more universal than the kinds of learned cultural associations we pair with colors or odors. One linguistic theory, John Ohala’s ‘Frequency Code,’ suggests that we associate lower pitches with aggression and hostility, while high-pitched frequencies tend to sound submissive, appeasing, or friendly. And these sound associations may explain the origins of one of the most positive symbols of all—the smile.

‘Retracting the corners of the mouth shrinks the size of the front cavity in the mouth, just like the vowels ɪ [ē] or i,’ Jurafsky writes. “In fact, the similarity in mouth position between smiling and the vowel i explains why we say ‘cheese’ when we take pictures; it is the smiling vowel.’

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