The film Julie & Julia is being released today, and once again the media abound with references to the late Julia Child as a chef (even Wikipedia calls her that). Of course Julia Child hosted a TV show called The French Chef, but she was no more a chef than she was French. As Tom Colicchio, a television host who really has been a chef, pointed out more than a year ago, “Julia Child was a great TV personality, but when you say the word ‘chef,’ it means ‘boss,’ and I don’t know what she was boss of, but it wasn’t the kitchen. Not to take anything away from Julia; she was brilliant. But she wasn’t a chef.”

The reviews of the film that I have read so far seem to focus on Meryl Streep’s uncanny “channeling” of Julia Child. Good for Meryl Streep; I don’t really care. I never particularly liked Julia Child’s shtick, which, as I understood it, was demystifying something that was never mystical to begin with, namely, the “art of French cooking.”

Her book Mastering the Art of French Cooking came out in 1961, just after I had spent a year as a postdoc in Paris. Back in New York, I reveled in the rich variety of non-French food that was available there, tired of the blandness of steack [sic] pommes frites and the heaviness of bœuf bourgugnon and cassoulet, not to mention the invariably overcooked vegetables. (When in 1969 the French discovered – probably by accident, as with the invention of champagne – that vegetables did not have to be overcooked, they promptly called the discovery nouvelle cuisine.)

The relative dullness of French cooking had already struck me during my first trip to Western Europe in 1958, when I traveled through France between Spain and Italy. In both of these countries I was amazed by the variety of the food, if only by the dozens of different kinds of tortillas in the one and of pastas in the other. In France I had to seek refuge from the monotony in North African and Vietnamese restaurants, and briefly thought that maybe colonialism wasn’t all that bad.

I believe that the mystification of French cuisine in the US is due to the very scant immigration of French people to this country, which meant that there was no need for real French restaurants, the kind that ordinary French people go to, to be established. This gave enterprising French cooks an excuse to serve (or to have served by intentionally surly waiters), at exorbitant prices, something that they called haute cuisine.

Julia Child’s aim, to make this kind of cooking accessible to everyone at home, may have been laudable. But it seems to have led to the sad spectacle of the Julie/Julia Project (the basis of the film), where a young woman spends a little over a year cooking every recipe in Child’s book, and ends up (in her words) “old, crazy, and worn-out.”

The other night I watched a TV movie titled Jesse Stone: Thin Ice, starring Tom Selleck, in which his love sex interest was played by Leslie Hope, a very attractive actress who seemed vaguely familiar to me, as did her name. I wondered if she might be a granddaughter of Bob Hope (whose original name was Leslie Townes Hope), but then I remembered: she played Terri Bauer in the first season of 24, when I watched the series and enjoyed it for a mistaken reason.

I noticed early on that most of the actors who played Non-Hispanic White (to use the official designation) Americans were Canadian: Kiefer Sutherland, Mia Kirschner, Elisha Cuthbert and the same Leslie Hope. As a result, I came to the naive belief that the series was a Canadian satire of American paranoia. It was something that I felt was desperately needed in the wake of 9/11.

It was only as the season ended that I realized that the series’ creators were serious. It was then that I lost hope. It was also when Leslie Hope’s character was killed.

Once again, a rash of media articles about obesity in the United States has broken out. And once again, the obesity statistics are defined in terms of BMI. Here is an example, from forbes.com:

To determine which cities were the most obese, we looked at 2006 data on body mass index, or BMI, collected by the Centers for Disease Control’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, which conducts phone interviews with residents of metropolitan areas about health issues, including obesity, diabetes and exercise.

In this case, participants report their height and weight, which survey analysts use to calculate a BMI. Those with a BMI between 18.5 and 24.9 are considered at a healthy weight, those with a BMI between 25 and 29.9 are considered overweight, and those with a BMI of 30 or higher are considered obese. About 32% of the nation is obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control; Memphis ranked above the national average at 34%

Never mind that the city that ranked third in obesity, Nashville, turned up among the 25 “fittest” (as opposed to “fattest”) in a different survey, this one by Men’s Fitness (and, as far as I can tell, not based on BMI). I am not interested in the results, only in the use of BMI. And, what’s more, after entering “obesity BMI” in a Yahoo news search, not one of the first ten articles that I clicked on included an actual definition of BMI.

The BMI, or body-mass index, is defined very simply as a person’s weight (in kilograms) divided by height (in meters) squared. Thus, since I weigh 66 kg (145 lb.) and stand 1.71 m (about 5 ft 7½ in), my BMI is 66÷1.71² ≈ 22.5.

Now anyone with any familiarity with physical science will recognize a quantity defined as force (such as weight) divided by length squared (or area) as representing pressure or stress. For example, for people of different sizes but with similar body proportions, the area of any portion of their body surface – for example, the portion that is in contact with a chair on which they may be sitting – will be proportional to the square of the height. If the chair bears a person’s full weight, then the average pressure on the chair’s seat, equal to the weight divided by the contact area, will be proportional to that person’s BMI.

It is precisely for this purpose – the design of office chairs – that the quantity now known as BMI was invented by the nineteenth-century Belgian mathematician Adolphe Quetelet.

But human bodies are three-dimensional, not two-dimensional. For people of different stature but similar geometric proportions, the body volume is proportional to the cube, not the square, of the height. And if the proportions of the various constituents of body mass (bone, muscle, fat etc.) are similar, then the weight is proportional to the volume, and consequently to the cube of the height. Consequently, what people who are geometrically and physiologically similar have in common is the weight divided by the height cubed, not squared.

What this means is that people with the same build will have a higher BMI if they are taller and a lower BMI if they are shorter. It has already been noted that very tall people who are quite fit — for example, professional basketball players — have BMI values that would rank them as overweight. Thus, an NBA guard who is two meters (about 6 ft 7 in) tall and who has the same build as I do would weigh 66×(2.0÷1.71)³ ≈ 106 kg (232 lbs) and his BMI would be 26.4, in the “overweight” range.

It has also been remarked that in populations that, on the average, are significantly shorter than European (or European-descended) ones, a lower overweight threshold is necessary. For Southeast Asians, for example, it’s 23 (as in this document from Singapore). Were the body types the same, this would be consistent with average height being about 8% less. In fact, the average adult height in China, for example, is 6–7% less than the average of white Americans. But the body types are in fact different (for example, the waist-hip ratio of Chinese men is 0.87 while that of white Americans is 0.98, as given here).

I have no doubt that if an index were defined on the basis of weight divided by height cubed, the discrepancies would become negligible.

A little while ago I received a message from the linguist Ben Zimmer (of the University of Pennsylvania and Oxford University Press) in regard to my post about localitarian. Ben, one of the people who publicized the “Word of the Year” locavore, commented that he not seen localitarian before, but he had come across locatarian.

That word immediately began to grate on me. One reason is that the obvious connection would be to the verb locate, and a locatarian would be someone who locates something or other. (It could be, for example, a location scout in the movie industry.) But another reason that a francophone reading it might associate it with the French locataire, which means ‘tenant’ or ‘renter.’ It’s what’s known as a false friend.

Anglophones who post on the Web often forget that it’s the World Wide Web, and that the English in which they write is likely to be read by millions of Web surfers for whom it is not the primary language. Of course I don’t expect such awareness from ordinary posters. But I do expect it from linguists. I know that this expectation is naive, since it is not borne out by the record.

The record, in fact, is mixed. When Noam Chomsky decided to use grammatical for ‘idiomatic’ he was being Humpty Dumpty (“a word means just what I choose it to mean”), knowingly and willfully redefining what is meant by grammar. But when Charles Ferguson introduced diglossia — a medical term — for a concept for which the far more canonical diglossy was already in use, he was just being sloppy. (I wrote about this in an essay.)

When William Safire (a “language maven” but not, academically, a linguist) chose to denote an ‘incorrect correction’ by the portmanteau incorrection (rather than the regularly formed miscorrection, since mis-, not in-, is the standard English prefix for ‘incorrect’), he was just trying to be clever, which is his shtick (remember “nattering nabobs of negativism”?). But when Mark Liberman, a prominent linguist (who has often been critical of Safire), propagates the usage on Language Log while ignoring the possibility that the word may be misread by francophones or other Romance-speakers (since French incorrection — along with its cognates — means ‘incorrectness’ or ‘discourtesy’), he is not furthering the cause advanced by much of the posting on Language Log: respect for linguists as the guardians of language. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Alexander Vinokourov is in the news again this week, first for his spectacular victories in Stages 13 (time trial) and 15 (Pyrenees) of the Tour de France, and again today because he was discovered to have benefited from an illegal blood transfusion. And once again the media, with the New York Times in the lead, refer to “Alexander Vinokourov, the Kazakh cyclist.”

When not dealing with Vinokourov, for the past few years media references to “Kazakh” have typically involved Borat. Now Borat Sagdiyev, the character invented and performed by Sacha Baron Cohen, is represented as a Kazakh, but in fact nothing about him has anything to do with the Kazakh people or Kazakhstan. His appearance, and that of the other supposedly Kazakh characters in the Borat film (most of whom are played by Romanians), is typically Southern European, and the supposedly Kazakh language that Borat speaks is in fact Hebrew. Real Kazakhs are Central Asians and their physical appearance is close to East Asian, or what in the United States is called simply Asian.

Vinokourov is blond and looks quite typically Russian. His name is Russian, as is his Russian Orthodox way of crossing himself. He is, in fact, a Kazakhstani Russian — that is, a citizen of Kazakhstan who is an ethnic Russian. Wikipedia gets it right by calling him “a Kazakhstani professional road bicycle racer.”

The fact that in Eastern and East Central Europe, and in most of Asia, nationality is defined by ethnicity and not by citizenship is something that the Western media seem to have a hard time with. I have written a number of essays on the subject. The issue affects me personally because I am a native of Poland, and my ancestors lived in Poland for hundreds of years, but my family and I are Polish Jews and we never regarded ourselves, nor were regarded by others (except ignorant Westerners), as Poles.

But there, again, goes the New York Times. In a recent article titled In Poland, a Jewish Revival Thrives — Minus Jews, the reporter, Craig S. Smith, tells us that “[b]efore Hitler’s horror… [o]ne in 10 Poles was Jewish.”

I sent Mr. Smith a message informing him of his error. Needless to say, there was no response. The high-and-mighty New York Times will publish misinformation, apologize for it if it is blatant enough, and keep on doing it. My nationality issue is minuscule when compared with Weapons of Mass Destruction.