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?