For my 23rd birthday, my mother gave me my first Miss Manners book. The inscription in her handwriting reads, “Happy Birthday, dear June! It may not do you any good, but it won’t do you any harm. Love, Ma & Pa”. Cute. I discovered 13 years later as I was sorting through her books, that my mother had given my father the same book on the same occasion as an unbirthday present. From memory, the inscription in my father’s copy went something like, “My Darling Husband, please accept this token of affection from your Darling Wife. As I am your Darling Wife and you always heed everything I say and do, I have no doubt that you will eagerly and promptly consume its contents and apply them to our everyday life. With love, your patient, long-suffering and exquisitely polite wife.” Lol. It would appear our family was the target audience for another of Miss Manners books, published some 4 years later: Miss Manners’ Guide to Domestic Tranquility.
I have never been known for my social graces. I’ve always struggled with blurting out whatever was on my mind, sometimes all jumbled up in a tangled mess, sometimes in the dead of silence but more often by interrupting whoever was speaking. It’s not that I didn’t aspire to good manners or understand how they translate into social capital – Pride & Prejudice is my favorite book after all – it’s just that I typically found my thoughts very interesting to myself, so they must be of interest to others, no? No?! (To be honest, I still somewhat believe that, hence this blog!)
To everyone’s surprise, 23 year-old June enjoyed the book, because it demonstrated that one could be witty and polite. I enjoyed it so much I gifted myself Miss Manner’s Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior for my 25th birthday. I was at the start of my career, I wanted to be the best I could be!
Friends and family reading this, I can hear you scratching your head wondering what on earth happened? You thought I didn’t know any better, and now you discover that I was trained by the best of the best? Confusing. I agree! I am a little confused myself. In re-reading the Right Thing to Say recently in preparation for this blog post, I remembered many painful moments where I would have been better served following Miss Manners advice than reacting impulsively.
Attempts To Improve On The Conventional
Why would anyone say “Congratulations” to a couple who has just announced an engagement or the expected birth of a child? Congratulating people is what is now done at funerals. Anyone who has suffered a loss can expect to be told:
“It’s really a blessing, you know.”
“You must be relieved it’s over.”
“You’re lucky it didn’t drag out longer.”
“Thank God he isn’t suffering any more.”
“You must realize that it’s all for the best.”
Those who are most skillful at comforting the bereaved with such congratulatory statements are able to go for a second round, Miss Manners has observed. When they have elicited a fresh outburst of woe, they congratulate the mourners again, this time for “dealing with” or “working through” their grief, or tell them what stage they are at, as if grief were a subway stop. Thus they have the enormous satisfaction of having done something for their friends. Driven them to tears.
Recently, a dear friend was diagnosed with cancer. A social gathering soon after the news had been shared in an email, I overhead a mutual friend share the story of how both his parents had had different forms of cancer, his father died from the disease and his mother had a rough go of it but all was well now. He sought to reassure, “But nothing I just told you about my parents applies to you. You have Cancer X, it has a super high remission rate, about 95%. You have nothing to worry about.” Our friend drily responded, “Well then! Nothing to worry about, not even the 5%”. Miss Manners smiled approvingly in the background.
Dishonesty
Dear Miss Manners,
Occasionally someone says or does something that I really disapprove of. I don’t want to lecture that person, obviously; yet I do not like to let the person think that I approve of their behavior.
My hostess said she hoped I like the picnic table we were eating off of, because her husband made it from lumber he had stolen. At a luncheon, one of the ladies (?) asked to take the receipt home to add to her husband’s receipts that he saves for tax purposes. We had all paid for our meals and it was a large sum. Of course, others went on to say that was great as they always put their intimate dinners with their husbands on his expense account.
Is there a perfect response?
Gentle Reader –
“You’re joking of course. We all know you are an honorable person.”
Please do not mess with this perfect response by pointing out to Miss Manners that it is not literally accurate. Honor in etiquette sometimes demands setting standards higher than those in practice and encouraging people to live up to them.
My go-to approach when finding myself in a similar situation as this Gentle Reader is to lecture the person and everyone around them. At length. With passion and no editorial skills, repeating myself over and over with complete self-righteousness until the social event is paralyzed and long-standing acquaintances are severed. I don’t enjoy myself when I do this and feel terrible afterwards, yet it is a pattern that has been hard to break.
In more recent years, I’ve tried a different tack in order to not lose all my adult friendships: I remain quiet. While there is less social roadkill in those instances, I usually feel ashamed at having abandoned my principles for the sake of social harmony. If only I’d remembered Miss Manners sooner!
Banned Topics
Here is a list of topics that polite people do not bring into a social conversation:
Sex; religion; politics; money; illness; the food before them at the moment and which foods they customarily eat or reject and why; anything else having to do with bodily functions; occupations, including their own and inquiries into anyone else’s; the looks of anyone present – especially to note any changes, even improvements, since these people were last seen; and the possessions of anyone present, including their hosts’ house and its contents and the clothing being worn by them and their guests, even favorably.
Those are only the traditionally banned topics. Miss Manners has been steadily adding to the list of what is likely to be explosive or soporific.
It is barely possible that the reasons for your divorce aren’t covered under sex or money – nevertheless, the whole topic is socially banned. Perhaps neither religion nor politics adequately describes your feelings about how terribly people are treating animals, vegetables or minerals – also banned. So are descriptions of computer software and hardware, and recitals of the plots of movies or books.
Do you begin to see why the world needs misbehaving athletes? Or, as everyone can be loudly heard to be thinking, fewer etiquette rules?
However, those who believe that all topics should be permitted would do well to remember when the airing of bigotry and sexism, whether in the form of jokes or observations, went unchallenged by social disapproval. Or they might remember longingly the time when obscene language and vulgarity were muted by social disapproval.
As we live in a time of increasing political divide, I find myself adhering voluntarily to Miss Manners decrees. It is exhausting to constantly be outraged or to be the one causing offense. Miss Manners gives us the tools to create space for pleasant exchanges – to lower the pressure cooker we find ourselves in. That might not be enough to arrive at world peace, but it is difficult to imagine world peace without the restraint of every day etiquette!
Interested in Miss Manners? She is featured in several newspapers and has an advice column. A few that caught my eye:
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