Hangry? Put some piecaken in your cake-hole

New York

THE language of food is changing at breakneck speed to reflect new menus, new mash-ups, new diets, new hashtags.

"We need new words and labels to give voice to our food obsessions and anxieties," said Josh Friedland, the author of the new book Eatymology: The Dictionary of Modern Gastronomy. "And we especially need more words to describe gastronomic emoting," such as "hangry", Mr Friedland said that he himself suffers from "Nordepression", a state of acute ennui brought on by the words "new Nordic cuisine".

Dictionaries do not always keep up, but the online Oxford English Dictionary adopted plenty of food slang this year, such as "cake-hole" and "chef…