Life’s secret menus

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.