A bad meal out might ruin your night, but the ordeal could leave you traumatised too, according to linguists who analysed hundreds of thousands of online reviews.

Diners who left one-star reviews on the website Yelp adopted the same phrases as trauma victims, using the past tense to distance themselves from the event, and terms such as “we” and “us” to share the pain, researchers said.

Daniel Jurafsky, a linguistics and computer science professor at Stanford University, studied the language in nearly a million online reviews of 6,500 restaurants across seven US cities, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco.

He found that disastrous meals out were more often down to shoddy service than bad food, prompting reviewers to post scathing accounts filled with past tense narratives and first-person plural personal pronouns.

“These are exactly the same characteristics we see in people’s writing after they’ve been traumatised,” Jurafsky told the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in San Jose. “These people have suffered minor traumas from bad service, rudeness, or being cheated.

“When fans of Princess Diana were writing after her death, or when people were blogging after a campus tragedy, people talked in the past tense to distance themselves from the bad event, and referred to ‘us as a group’ and that ‘we are going to get through it together’,” he explained.

Having pored over the negative reviews, the Stanford team turned to the most gushing reviews of the same 6,500 restaurants. This time people’s language depended on the prices at the restaurant. Expensive food was often described in sexual terms, while cheap food reviews were infused with drugs references.



“People who liked the expensive restaurants referred to ‘orgasmic pastry’, ‘seductively-seared foie gras’ and even ‘very naughty deep-fried pork belly’,” Jurafsky said, quoting from some of the reviews he studied.

But the language shifted dramatically in diners’ reviews of the cheaper establishments. People talked of craving, being addicted, and needing a fix of items on the menus. One described garlic noodles as their drug of choice. All manner of food, from chips to cupcakes, was likened to crack.

Junk food, such as pizzas, chips and desserts, drew the most drug references from reviewers. “It’s as if they are feeling guilty, and that talking about the food as a drug, as an addiction, makes them feel less guilty, because they cannot help themselves. It’s like ‘the cupcake made me eat it’,” Jurafsky said.

Quite why people use sexual phrases to describe expensive food is more of a puzzle he conceded. “Obviously food and sex are linked, they are both oral pleasures, but why do we use these words for expensive foods? Maybe people at these flashy restaurants are on dates and already thinking about sex,” he said.

Jay Rayner, the food critic, said: “It is one of the curiosities of food reviewing that while we mock the cliches of dirty food – dirty burgers, pimped fried chicken and so forth – that we often use the same language, of addiction and pharmaceuticals, when trying to describe that stuff. The language of addiction is very good at describing the appeal of food we suspect we shouldn’t be eating.”

In another experiment, the Stanford scientists analysed words used on restaurant menus. Fancier places filled their menus with terms many people might never have come across, such as tonnarelli, persillade, and bastilla. The average length of the words on the posh menus were longer too. While cheaper places had “decaf” and “sides”, the finer restaurants used “decaffeinated” and “accompaniments”. When Jurafsky looked at how prices changed with average word length on menus, he found that every additional letter added 10p to the cost of a main course.