Miss Manners?
Don’t blow your nose in a napkin. Do use the right fork.
Have you ever been in a restaurant and watched as some uncouth guy at the next table blew his nose in his napkin, licked his knife clean and then went to work with a toothpick? Did you then conclude that our manners aren’t what they used to be? Join the club.
A survey in 2018 found that 74 percent of Americans believe we have become more rude and less critical of behavior we used to scorn, such as using cellphones in restaurants and cursing in public. What the survey didn’t show was that people have always felt manners were going downhill, that the new generation isn’t matching up to cultured persons such as you and me. This goes back to Socrates, and it continues today, according to John Kasson, a cultural historian.
Kasson, a soft-spoken North Carolinian who still wears a tie to dinner, said that manners reflect the political, economic and social realities of their time. In the 1500s, it was polite for noblemen not to relieve themselves in the corner of the dining room. Ladies sat in such a way as not to display their privates to fellow diners. (It makes the guy fouling the napkin look like a dandy.)
Americans created their own set of manners, and judged each other more on behavior than birthright. As we became more urban and civilized, upwardly mobile natives — and newly arrived immigrants — could climb the social ladder simply by looking and acting like they belonged there. Nowhere was this more tested than at the dinner table.
For starters, according to one manners guide popular in 1890: “One is correctly seated at the table when the figure is erect but not rigid, not self-consciously tense; feet firmly on the floor; elbows off the table; left hand in the lap when it is not engaged. The chair should be neither too near nor too far from the table: a good distance is about eight inches from the chest.”
Strict rules applied to what you wore and what you said. You had to master the silverware, as your place setting likely included a pasMANNERS » 3C