1995 — Etiquette’s Annus Horribilis?

Think airline etiquette is bad now in 2023? This was how bad airline travel etiquette was depicted in a 1995 New York Times article. The year 1995 was an exceptionally bad year for manners and etiquette, according to Judith Martin.

Past Year a Horrendous One for Etiquette

What a year for etiquette news! My stars! (as Miss Manners would exclaim were she not afraid of corrupting the language of the young by setting an intemperate example).

Even those who have not learned to recognize etiquette news as such— who can listen to society's unceasing complaints of disrespect and demands for a return to civility without ever thinking that this has anything to do with the decline of manners— must have noticed.

Why even Miss Manners, who sees etiquette problems under every rock, or at least behind every impulse to throw one, was startled.

"Where is their sense of manners? Where is their sense of courtesy?" the speaker of the House lamented as he connected shutting down the federal government with his perception that the President of the United States had been lacking in the finer points of politeness toward himself and the Senate majority leader.

This is the same Speaker who presides over the House of Representatives, where, that same week one representative called the President a "little bugger" and two others engaged in a shoving match.

That people who do not pretend to be etiquette-conscious go ballistic when they believe they are treated rudely is no surprise to Miss Manners. We The People have always believed in the inalienable right to be offensive while also being mightily indignant that others think that they can get away with being offensive. Elected officials tru ly represent the populace in that.

She was just surprised at the scale of the reaction, possibly because she happened to be standing in the middle of the city of Washington when the fluorescent lights went out. One minor dispute over an ambiguous point of protocol and — zap.

But overwrought reactions to perceived rudeness should be familiar enough to all Miss Manners has been tracking such melees through less-sensational news reports all year. Private citizens who are disgruntled with the way they are treated are forever retaliating in kind, and Miss Manners considers them restrained when they limit themselves to insults and obscenities.

Before there was a suspect in the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma, the President condemned the atrocity with the assumption that it must have been a reaction to rudeness: "Almost every American has some experience with this— a rude tax collector, an arbitrary regulator, an insensitive social worker, an abusive law officer," he admitted in making the point that this was no excuse for violence. Although this early guess does not seem to be borne out, everyone familiar with the pattern of smaller-scale crimes recognized it plausibility.

What the public failed to recognize, in its hilarity over the Speaker's indignation, was that symbolic insults are as galling as explicit ones. It is folly to think that they only bother officials in the upper echelons of government and diplomacy, when they are an irritant in everyday life.

This particular case is a doubtful one. The President's claim that he did not snub the speaker is bolstered by a sociable photograph; and his excuse that a funeral trip suspends easy amenities is valid. The dignity properly due the Speaker did not seem to have been seriously compromised until he managed the job himself.

But she wants to point out that those who ridiculed him were misguided in failing to understand the importance of symbolic etiquette. You don't have to be of high rank to recognize and react to symbolic forms of respect or insult; failure to return a high-five serves as a provocation to murder on the streets.

Another astonishing bit of etiquette news, having to do with the O.J. Simpson trial, seems to have passed by everyone except the ever-vigilant Miss Manners. It's true that courtroom shouting, pushiness, gum-chewing and other etiquette violations by lawyers, witnesses, jurors, reporters and spectators hardly passed unnoticed, but such behavior is, alas, no longer what Miss Manners would consider newsworthy,

What startled her happened after the trial. Much of what passes for polite society refused to have anything to do with the acquitted defendant —and this in a country whose newest ritual is the triumphant welcome home of convicted criminals from jail.

Fame has long been supposed to be the most socially desirable quality of all, regardless of how it is obtained, and here were people actively passing up opportunities to socialize with a person who had commanded the national attention for a year.

Public disapproval, an extremely powerful weapon, is the only sanction etiquette has to enforce its own rules. Properly done, it consists of merely refusing to socialize with etiquette outlaws; the extreme measure, for outright villains, is to pretend not to notice their existence. (Far from condoning lambasting the rude with retaliatory rudeness, etiquette expels people who do this from its ranks.)

Crudeness and lewdness used to be the chief targets of public disapproval, but now that these have become popular, it has had to limit itself to at tacking smoking, disrespect for the environment and various forms of bigotry. Moderate forms of shunning were also commonly used as a supplement to the more powerful sanctions mandated by the law. Criminals who had served their sentences (then not considered to be the moral equals of the innocent) endured this permanent loss of reputation.

Now society as represented by neighbors, at club, even book publishers — has resurrected this sanctionWhatever one thinks of this use of public disapproval in general, or in this particular case, its reappearance is the biggest etiquette news of the half-century. — By Miss Manners, 1995

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