4 Mind your Ps and Qs!
As a new etiquette guide for the modern age is published, Charlie Gowans-eglinton polishes up her manners
IF YOU’RE PLANNING on celebrating the coronation bank holiday with a street party, you might want to pick up a manners manual with the bunting, lest you embarrass yourself over the devilled eggs (pinky out? One bite? Do you still have to politely eat one if they’ve been sitting in the sun for three hours?). Happily, oracle of poshness Debrett’s has published a special coronation update of its ‘correct form’ handbook, with additions that cater to modern life.
Like: how best to announce your engagement on Twitter, which isn’t a topic that anyone I know has ever worried about, and reads rather like someone’s instructed CHATGPT to relate to Millennials. (Should you be wondering, though, the hot take is to tell your parents before you tell the Tweeps.) Also of note, novelty ties are officially a no-no, which is timely news – and can be used against anyone in your office who thinks it’s fun to wear a Union Jack tie to work on coronation week.
While there is nothing common about Debrett’s, much about manners is still common sense. Men shouldn’t need it in writing that manspreading on the tube ‘as if to show who is king of the jungle’ is bad manners: my hard stare, head swivelled with intent, should tell them that. Sadly, the hard stare works less well on those who listen to music without headphones, which is deemed ‘the worst sort of noise pollution’ (although I’d argue that builders playing Kissfm at full blast on scaffolding in residential areas is worse).
The Debrett’s guide was first published in 1970, and there’s less call for a who’swho and how-to for all things posh in the year 2023: so much of the latest advice deals with modern technology. We already knew it was bad manners to have your phone out at the dining table, and surely everyone knew to switch them off at a funeral! But perhaps not that you should put it away when paying at a checkout.
As for the increasing number of us who work from a coffee shop instead of an office: you should order something at ‘regular intervals’, which I can never resist doing anyway, but I will be harder pressed to find a laptop-friendly cafe ‘where table space is not at a premium’.
‘Try to curb impetuous texting,’ might be tricky, too. There’s nothing in the 480 pages on whether it’s annoying to constantly ping memes and screenshots at your group chats – which would have come in handy with that one Facebookaddicted distant relative that everyone seems to have. But it does take aim at the use of emojis. Whoever wrote ‘don’t rely on emojis to convey nuanced information’ is missing out: personally, I think that the upside down smiley face is more nuanced than some novels, and much less annoying than a voice note – especially now that I have to find headphones in my bag before I can listen to it.