Have table manners been ‘canceled’?

Dear Miss Manners: I find myself stunned at most people’s table manners. For example: breaking bread/rolls and buttering each bite, using a thumb to push food onto a fork, correct utensil usage (using a place spoon for soup), cutting up an entire entree salad at once, serving coffee after dessert, leaving napkins on

the table at end of a meal, passing salt and pepper together, etc.

In ever say anything,but just wonder if the etiquette rules I was taught, and followed in a very upper-level hospitality position, have been canceled.

Gentle Reader: It is never a good idea to monitor other people’ stable manners, and not only because you are apt to spill something all over yourself while you do so.

Miss Manners notices that you are already agitated, because you have mixed up what should and

what shouldnot be done, and thrown in some general rules. Justtoclarify: Bread and rolls should be broken into small pieces and buttered individually; thumbs should not be used as pushers; the so-called place spoon is a mediumsized oval spoon that can be used (as the teaspoon should not be) for soup or dessert; napkins should be put to the left of the plate at the end of the meal, and salt and pepper should be passed together.

Th atpe ople violate these and other basic rules does not mean that they have been canceled, any more than a rising burglary rate

demonstrates that the law now permits it. Dear Miss Manners: I

was invited to a wedding by a family who chooses to have no other contact with me. With the invita

tion came a bridal registry, most items being chances to finance aspects of the couple’s overseas honeymoon. I added up some of the other small choices on the registry, wrote a check f ort ha ta mount and sent it with regrets that I wouldn’t be able to attend the wedding.

The check went uncashed for six months. Then I received a thankyou card with my check enclosed, thanking me for my good wishes, but with the suggestion that I donate thi smoneytoa charity of my choice. I chose not to respond to the couple in an yway .Yo u rre sponse? Gentle Reader: Well,

we can rule out the possibility that these people were insulted by being offered money. Miss Man- ners despairs of thinking that such delicacy still

exists. Certainl yno tamong people who blatantly asked their guests to pay their wedding bills.

Returning a present to its donor is also a traditional insult, although that, too, seems to be forgotten by those who ask their bene

factorsto t ry harder to please them.

In this case, it does seem tha tan insult wa s intended, which makes it all the more odd that the family should have brokenthe estrangement by inviting you to the wedding. Miss Manners agrees with you that they seem the right sort of people from whom it is wise to be estranged.