BOOK REVIEW : Two Big Forks Down! : THE EATEN WORD: The Language of Food, the Food in Our Language <i> By Jay Jacobs</i> ; <i> (Birch Lane Press: $15.95) </i>

Every so often, there’s a book of intriguing, partly accurate bits of food lore. Accuracy -wise, Jay Jacobs’s “The Eaten Word” runs somewhere around the middle of the pack; what makes it really ghastly is its obnoxious tone. The usual half-baked food lore book is eager and naive, but Jacobs is convinced he’s knowledgeable and wised-up. And, wow, is he wrong.

To be fair, Jacobs’ would-be sophisticated tone may be just the writerly equivalent of stage fright. That would explain the gratuitous snotty remarks that pepper the book (such as, mai-tai cocktails are served “to egregious rubes in Sino-Polynesian restaurants”).

There’s no way to list all the mistakes in this book, but here’s a typically irritating example. Jacobs makes fun of the Italian dessert zuppa inglese on the ground that it’s neither a soup nor English. But zuppa inglese is absolutely English--it’s the Italian version of the famous English trifle. As for the soup part, Jacobs apparently doesn’t know that the original meaning of soup was sop , a piece of bread that was often added to broth in the Middle Ages to make a more substantial dish. The Italians think of trifle as a cake sopping with liquor and custard sauce, which it certainly is.

In short, you can’t trust Jacobs to be right about anything, but you can always count on him to be coarse, smug and obtuse--right from the intro, where he calls his former job as a restaurant critic a matter of being a “hired gut.” Rather than, say, a hired palate .

The worst of it is that, for somebody writing a book about language and food, Jacobs has no ear for language. He believes, or affects to believe, that metaphorical names like butternut squash are “sailing under false colors” ( it contains absolutely no butter or nuts! ). The chocolate truffle, he points out damningly, has a “deliberately contrived physical resemblance to the genuine article to justify the nomenclature.”

Well, if you actually thought that a chocolate truffle was a subterranean fungus, relax. Jacobs will straighten you right out.