Supposedly the coffee chain Starbucks will sell you a smaller, 8oz cappuccino even though this size and its price is never published on their menu boards — you just have to ask for a ‘short’. Handy to know. In any case, I never liked using the word ‘grande’. Two syllables seems pretentious; using one makes you sound like a music-hall Yorkshireman.
The cultish West Coast burger chain In-N-Out has created a minor art form from this kind of secret menu. In-N-Out’s official menu is tiny, but an extensive samizdat menu has circulated among aficionados for years solely by word of mouth, like the poetry of Homer. Go to an In-N-Out and ask for, say, a ‘Flying Dutchman Animal Style’ and the staff will prepare it unhesitatingly — even though its existence is never acknowledged in print.
Is life itself full of secret menus? In other words are there vital concepts, ideas and behaviours which are never adopted simply because nobody has a word for them, like Ancient Greeks, who had no word for blue?
Take the word ‘downsizing’. Often an ugly euphemism for ‘firing people’, the word itself is not quite redundant. Businesses love it because it sounds so purposeful — ‘to reduce something in size through intent rather than necessity’.
For this reason the word has been seized on by older householders to fill a previous gap in their vocabulary. Before ‘downsizing’ was a word, any move to a smaller property was faintly embarrassing — it implied you couldn’t pay the gas bill or your pension was with Equitable Life. The new word gives people a new licence to move, by suggesting you are moving through choice not force of circumstance.
The term ‘Designated Driver’ was a deliberate coinage, spread with the active support of Hollywood. Scriptwriters agreed to use the invented term in popular sitcoms and dramas: once the phrase became current the behaviour naturally followed. (In Belgium and the Netherlands, any designated driver, male or female, is called ‘Bob’ as in ‘I can’t drink tonight, I’m Bob’. It is a Dutch acronym for bewust onbeschonken bestuurder or ‘deliberately sober driver’.)
One valuable new coinage is the word ‘micropub’. This is a new, badly needed type of drinking establishment (named and conceived by Martyn Hillier of the Butcher’s Arms in Herne, Kent) and part of what I hope is an irresistible trend. The ‘rules’ for a micropub are as follows. One small room, no lagers (the NFL etched into the window of the Just Reproach in Deal stands for ‘No F***ing Lager’), no TV, no music, no mobile phone calls. Just good beer from small breweries and high quality banter. The food offered is minimal, typically pork scratchings.
Being small, micropubs often do not have a bar, and hence do something every other civilised country has done for years — bring beer to your table. This breaks the tyranny of the round system, where everyone is forced to drink at the pace of the table’s booziest occupant.
Two important things here. To be a great pub, as distinct from just a good pub, you must draw your customers from a wide range of backgrounds and ages. Yet once you start serving food, you necessarily end up narrowing the demography of your clientèle. Hence the foodie-pub trend may rescue pubs financially but at the cost of much of their social value, with pubs now polarised into poncey bourgeois food pubs and rough boozers.
The micropub avoids both pitfalls. And the name is vital to the spread of the idea. Words do matter. Take those pork scratchings — if they were called morceaux croustillants de couenne d’une forme curieuse they would be a Notting Hill delicacy selling for £9 a packet.
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