Now that November is here, it won't be long until that special time of the year when we all have to start faking sympathy for friends and colleagues who claim to have the flu, although it's patently obvious to us that the worst they could be suffering from is a cold, writes Frank McNally
There will be no point in you telling them that if it really was flu, they would be at home in bed, unable to get up. This only encourages them. They will nod heroically and agree with you that bed is exactly where they should be, if only they could be sure that the world would not fall apart in their absence.
Of course, it's not their fault, really, because as well as suffering from a minor ailment, they are also victims of language devaluation, a process that forces us all to exaggerate from time to time.
The cold used to be hard currency in Ireland. As recently as the 1980s you could still buy a bit of sympathy with it. But it's worth nothing these days. If you're looking for special consideration from friends and co-workers now, flu is the minimum entry level.
(It should be said in passing that doctors have not helped this situation by their habit of always referring - especially in the medical advice columns of newspapers - to the "common cold". No self-respecting hypochondriac is going to admit to having a condition described as "common". Small wonder there's a stigma attached.)
Linguistic inflation has been going on for centuries, no doubt. But modern developments, especially the growth of the fast food industry, have definitely increased the pressures on language. For me it was a watershed moment in this country when, some years ago, McDonald's abolished the word "small" and replaced it with "regular". Until that time, "regular" was what you were when you consumed enough fibre. If you were a bit older, it might also imply that you had fought for the Free State army in the Civil War.
Henceforth, however, it was to be the term applied to the smallest portion of French fries you could buy. Then even "regular" was dropped. And somehow we arrived at the situation today where, when you buy a coffee in Starbucks, the minimum size is "tall". If you make the mistake of asking for a "regular" coffee, you risk being looked at as if you really are a Civil War veteran.
Pubs have not yet been infected, so far as I know. Last time I checked in one, you could still buy a "short". But it's probably only a matter of time before this anachronism is addressed. Either way, word inflation has already spread well beyond the areas of coffee-drinking, fast food and respiratory illness.
One of Ireland's worst examples is the annual athletic event known as the women's "mini-marathon". Yes, it's an achievement for some people to complete a 6.2-mile course, and some level of self-aggrandisement may be allowable. But nobody would call you a "mini-millionaire" if you won the €250,000 prize on the National Lottery wheel-of-fortune. You might as well describe the Fiat Panda as a "minibus", while you're at it.
We will skip hastily over the role that estate agents have played in language inflation, except to say that their ability to exaggerate the size and attractiveness of properties has at least kept pace with house prices. In the interest of fairness, however, we will not skip the contribution of this newspaper to the phenomenon.
In the days when we still had different editions, for example, the first one was always called the "special". This was a bit like saying small was regular. By the same logic, the later edition, in which we updated stories and corrected any mistakes we noticed in the earlier one, should have been the "extra-special". Yet, paradoxically, sobriety always set in after midnight and the late edition was only ever called the "city".
Speaking of sobriety, journalists often rail against the almost puritanical system hospitals have for describing the conditions of patients in whom the press take an interest. Matrons and ward sisters invariably confine themselves to using one of four or five approved adjectives, none of them compound. This can be very frustrating.
When you're the late reporter trying to turn a two-paragraph story into a three-paragraph story, there is - frankly - nothing worse than being told that Mr Bloggs is in a "stable" or "comfortable" condition. But credit where it's due. In terms of language-currency stability, hospital matrons are like the post-war Bundesbank defending the Deutschmark.
And yet, I fear that not even they can save the cold. A sure sign of its demise is the fact that drugs companies have cottoned on to the public's need to exaggerate. A new generation of lemon-and-paracetemol drinks with the word "max" added to the name seems to be aimed solely at the growing market of people pretending to have the flu.
Soon, "cold" will be phased out altogether, to be formally replaced by the f-word. Then doctors will have to come up with a new term for the more serious condition, probably ending in "itis". At which point, a few leading-edge hypochondriacs will start claiming to have that as well. And before we know it the cycle will have started again.