Importance of Table Manners Understated

It is surprising how few of us eat absolutely nicely. This does not refer by any means exclusively to those who have not had the advantage of early training. Men, and even women, who, by their birth and breeding. should have good table manners are not above reproach in this respect.

Love Affairs Not Dependent on Table Manners

“Do you remember the hero of Charles Dudley Warner who fell in love with his wife because she ate s0 daintily?” asks the North American. If most of our love affairs depended on our good manners, it is to be feared that this would be a rather loveless old earth.

It is surprising how few of us eat absolutely nicely. This does not refer by any means exclusively to those who have not had the advantage of early training. Men, and even women, who, by their birth and breeding. should have good table manners are not above reproach in this respect.

Of course, we may not indulge in such glaring faults as jugglery with one’s knife, talking with a full mouth, drinking with a spoon in the cup or eating with painful audibleness. But how many of us, for instance, eat our bread only after breaking it into small bits? Do we all remember to dip our soup spoons away from, rather than toward us. Do we duck our heads to get that soup, instead of lifting the spoon to our mouths?

This latter breach of table niceties is something of a temptation, it must be confessed. If one is large of body. shaky of hand and with a fine regard for clean shirt fronts or blouses, which the rigid rules prescribed forbid covering with an expanse of tucked in napkin. Perhaps someone may say, “Finikin’ nonsense, all this talk on table etiquette. It is what a man is that counts, not externals.”

Unfortunately, except to one’s nearest and dearest, what one is may be so obscured by what one does as to go practically unrevealed. A big heart or a profound brain may be admired, but somehow with most of us it is the grating little unpleasantnesses of conversation or manner of those kind, brainy men and women that make the deepest impression.

Too great a stress cannot be laid upon a thorough training in table niceties. If we do not want some one to have occasion to wince at the offensive ways of eating of our children, as we have often winced at others, we should begin almost from the cradle to instill the principles of dainty table manners. – The San Francisco Call, 1907

 

🍽️Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J. Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia