Inflationary effects in language and elsewhere

Inflation is a well-known phenomenon to most of us. Together with unemployment inflation is one of the typical diseases of modern economies. However, inflationary processes are not restricted to the economic sphere in the proper sense. Consider for instance the English words gentleman and lady, which in their original meaning denoted persons from the nobility, but today are often used synonymously to man and woman. Similar stories can be told about titles in many languages. In Swedish, a number of different words have been used for unmarried women, such as jungfru, fröken, mamsell; they all seem to have been initially used for high-status women, but have later become general titles for unmarried women and in some cases, they have finally even obtained a derogatory character. Intuitively, we may say that titles tend to lose their "value" over time, but exactly what is the parallel with money here? Many titles such as lord or professor are connected with a certain status in society; they guarantee the bearer certain rights and privileges and the respect of others. If, for instance, a king confers a title on one of his subjects, the effects are similar to the ones that would obtain if the king gave him or her a piece of land or a sum of money. But there is a crucial difference between the piece of land on one hand and the title or the money on the other, the value connected with the title and the money is purely conventional. That is, there must be something in the world that corresponds to the title or to the sum of money, but what that is depends on a convention. In some cases, the lack of a real-world counterpart to an object with a conventional value will lead to an immediate crisis. If I try to sell two-hundred tickets to a theatre with one hundred seats I will quite soon be in serious trouble. When the relationship between the object and what it "buys" in the world is less direct; however, there is always a temptation to multiply the conventionally-valued objects to obtain a short-term gain. A king may thus buy the loyalty of a number of people by making them into, say, "Grand Dukes". But if the number of Grand Dukes in the country doubles, the value of that title is bound to decrease. Conferring a title, or doing other similar things, …