Cabibbo advanced our understanding of the weak interactions
by phenomenologically implementing universality in the face
of apparently contradictory data. We emulate his approach
by recognizing that the couplings of the Higgs boson to the
fermions of the Standard Model can also be constructed in a
basis in which an approximate form of universality appears.
All known data can be accommodated, but new physics is
required to account for the masses of the light fermions. We
present implications for the ratios of masses of sterile neutrinos
by applying this idea to neutrinos through the see-saw mechanism.