Etiquette and Your Bottom Line

From a 1992 New York Times article on with Leticia Baldridge on the relaxing of manners in general, which led to a new found need for training in corporate manners for the 1990s, spurring on the “1990s Etiquette era.”

Etiquette used to mean knowing what fork to use and standing when an adult entered the room. Ladies went to charm school to learn how to curtsy, balance encyclopedias on their heads for good posture and attract the right proposal. Today proper protocol is considered a business requirement, and executives are attending charm school in droves, eager to learn the finer points of finishing. In the last 20 years, we have been concentrating so much on productivity that we have forgotten about etiquette. Now companies have realized that half their employees don't know how to conduct themselves, explains Beverly Washington, who owns Image Factor, a Chicago image management firm.

Many American overseas business ventures fail because Americans dont know how to treat . other people, says Dorothea Johnson, director of the Protocol School of Washington, D.C., which provides etiquette and cross-cultural training to ambassadors, senators and celebrities. A business person can determine another's sophistication in five to seven seconds, notes Washington. Whether you know how to properly place your napkin, shake hands or butter bread affects whether someone will choose to do business with you." 

As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Your manners are always under examination, and by committees little suspected, awarding or denying you very high prizes when you least think it.” Now etiquette means knowing how to conduct yourself and put others at ease in every situation. The goal of charm schools is no longer luring husbands, but contracts. It’s just like any game: If you know the rules, you can play, says Johnson. It’s important for kids to grow up knowing how to conduct themselves, says Washington.

Kids today are thrown into many adult situations, so they must learn how not to appear rude and ignorant. They go out more with their parents. They take internships and work with other professionals. Manners used to be taught in the home, but parents are too tired and busy these days, says Dori Steves, owner of the Don Steves School of Etiquette and International Good Manners in Boca Raton, Fla. Schools don't have time to teach it because they're too busy with gun control. 

Etiquette is crucial in social situations. If you don't know how to make small talk, dress appropriately or recover from forgetting someones name, you're at a distinct disadvantage, says Joseph Durkin, executive director of the John Robert Powers School in Chicago, which offers classes in personal development and social awareness. People think etiquette school just glosses over the surface, teaching clients how to groom themselves, walk and smile prettily, says Steves. In fact, we go into depth with things they use every day: how to present awards, give and receive flowers, pour a drink, serve adults, call a waiter, pull out a chair, butter a roll. We teach them how to conduct themselves not just at the dining table but in life. 

The basis of all manners is showing respect for other people, stresses Janette H. Godfrey, owner of Pennsylvaniabased Distinctions, which imparts social graces to kids ages 8 to 18. If we have good manners, we enjoy confidence in social situations. Knowing how to do the right thing at the right time frees us up to be concerned for other people, not just ourselves.

Etiquette has certainly evolved through the ages, Steves says. It started in Versailles in the 14th Century when the King put a big notice up about how people should behave in Court. The requirements of etiquette have changed since then to suit the age. It used to be very swashbuckling for a man to protect his lady from mud by putting his cape on the ground and walking on the street side of the walkway, she added. 

Today, if you ask a teenage boy to walk on the outside of a sidewalk, he has no idea why, except maybe to stop a bullet. All the things that John Wayne used to know have gone by the wayside." You can avoid falling into this category by checking out training programs. Beyond passing food to the right, here are some specific tips from the experts:

• When you are invited to a party, don't ask the hostess about the menu or who else has been invited. 
• At a reception, take no more than three items of food at a time from the tea table. 
• Don't lift a roll to your mouth. Break bread one bite-size piece at a time. Butter it as you go along, not all at once. 
• If you drop a piece of silverware in a restaurant don't pick it up. Signal the waiter and ask him to do it. 

As our society becomes more mechanized, new guidelines are springing up to govern phone manners, computer manners…even fax manners. 

• With faxes, always use a cover sheet and never fax a document that is longer than 10 pages; use a messenger or overnight service instead. 

And a few general business rules: 

• Always present your business card face up, with the writing facing the recipient 
• When wearing a name tag, place it on the right side of your body. 
• A man should always wait for a lady to initiate a handshake.— By Reshma Memon Yaqub, Special to ‘Your Money’ in North County Times, 1994

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

Bright Spark in 80’s Etiquette Interest

        

A photo of Judith Martin from her syndicated Miss Manners column. Her column led to a resurgence in learning etiquette, which helped spur on the 1990’s “Etiquette Era.”

She Minds Your Manners

NEW YORK -Call her a response to the Me Decade. “There’s been a tremendous lack of consideration in the name of self assertiveness and honesty,” says Judith Martin. “If I asked you how I looked and you said ‘awful,’ you'd then congratulate yourself for being so honest. A lot of this honesty has simply been an excuse for bad behavior.” She carefully crosses her legs and continues. “People have tried all of that and they don't like it. They thought they could do without kindness, and they were wrong. That’s why they’re rediscovering manners.” And discovering Judith Martin, a gracious, 43-year-old Washington Post drama and film critic who is never without her white gloves and her tart wit. 

The daughter of a diplomat, she realized two key things about herself a few years back. 1) She was tired of being insulted by sales clerks; 2) She was the only person at the Post who knew the correct thing to wear to an afternoon wedding. And so Miss Manners, arbiter of correct behavior, was born. As Miss Manners, Judith Martin pens a wickedly funny Q & A etiquette column that is syndicated thrice weekly to 70 newspapers. Her columns have just been compiled in a handsome, 745-page hardcover volume, “Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior” that has set off a tasteful zoom in her popularity. She is on the verge of becoming a household name – the new Amy Vanderbilt, if you will. But with a decided difference. – Argus-Courier, Petaluma, Calif., 1982

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

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

Reminder: We have a free webinar on Dining According to Hollywood and Dining Etiquette as Presented on Film! You can watch it live on September 23rd at 4:00 pm PST (Pacific Standard Time). We have a limited number of viewers who can attend via Zoom, however, if you are registered and cannot watch the event live, you’ll be sent a video link to watch a copy at your leisure. Link to the Free Webinar –– https://events.humanitix.com/dining-according-to-hollywood-the-art-of-dining-on-film Please email any questions to: theetiquettechannel@gmail.com

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

Reaching for the Right Fork in 1999

Don't know which fork to use? You say you don't much care? Figure such silliness really doesn't matter? Time to wake up and smell the coffee (which always should be served on your right): If your boredom with etiquette has led to ‘boor-dom’ at the dinner table, that new job you covet may be lost before dessert’s served.– Image from 

What Have We Here?: The Etiquette and Essentials of Lives Once Lived, from the Georgian Era through the Gilded Age and Beyond...

It's never too late to brush up on table etiquette. Don't know which fork to use? You say you don't much care? Figure such silliness really doesn't matter? Time to wake up and smell the coffee (which always should be served on your right): If your boredom with etiquette has led to ‘boor-dom’ at the dinner table, that new job you covet may be lost before dessert’s served.

Patti Shock, chairman of the tourism and convention department in the College of Hotel Administration at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said if a job interview includes a meal out, the applicant would be well-advised to be comfortable with the basics of etiquette. “There have been a lot of cases of people who have been on their third job interview, and it will be a meal function, and they'll do some faux pas and not get the job and not know why,” Shock said.

The list of prime lose-the-job offenses, she said, includes talking with a mouth full of food – something we all know we shouldn't do, but something that some of us apparently forget when we're busy trying to make what should be a good impression. “It's knowing that when you pass the bread, you pass to the right and you never force it in somebody’s hand; you place it on the table. And it always goes to the right,” she said. “If they ask for the salt, you pass (the salt and pepper) together. When eating soup, you don't lift the spoon directly to your mouth; you circle it away before bringing it to your mouth.”

All of which may sound like so much fussiness. But ignoring or being ignorant of such social niceties can brand you as person prospective employers, workers and friends aren't too eager to have around. “People who are educated in this will recognize little faux pas,” she said. As a country, Shock said, we're forgetting the rules of etiquette — something she notices among her mostly college-age students. “Back in my day, when you had the nuclear family that sat down to dinner at night, families generally instructed you,” said Shock, who's 58. “Plus, we used to have grandparents in the home” to provide any training parents missed. Many of today’s families, Shock said, rarely sit down and eat together.

“Now, it’s pretty much catch as catch can.” Some of the details of etiquette are admittedly arcane. But if, like a lot of people, you don't automatically know that your bread-and-butter plate is the one on your left, it's never too late to learn. You can study the basic rules, of course; Judith Martin has even written an entire book on the subject, “Miss Manners’ Basic Training: Eating.”

You can take cues from your more well-versed dinner companions. And while Shock laments that many restaurants aren’t training their servers in the fine points of etiquette anymore, some still are, so – especially in better restaurants — you may take your cues from your server.

At Le Cirque restaurant at Bellagio, 3600 Las Vegas Blvd. South, the staff underwent a three-week training program before the restaurant opened, said assistant general manager Peter Tischmann, on “everything from proper place setting to posture in the restaurant to verbiage.” Daily sessions, Tischmann said, reinforce various points.

Tischmann said that, like all other aspects of proper etiquette, it's important for servers to make guests comfortable. “It's definitely one of the basics, to make them feel at ease,” he said. “We don't want to be uptight and stuffy.” Tischmann conceded that the elaborate place settings the restaurant sometimes uses can be intimidating for some patrons.

“I just don't think they're knowledgeable about it, in terms of silverware settings and what forks and knives to use,” Tischmann said. “It can be sort of overwhelming, whether it be a fish knife or oyster fork. We have a whole slew of silverware,” Tischmann said, ”six or seven different spoons” that may include demitasse, dessert and sauce spoons in addition to the familiar teaspoon.

As a waiter serves a person, he said, they're instructed to subtly explain the silverware – “And here is your fish knife,” for example – to make things easier on guests. Some of the niceties of server etiquette at Le Cirque are things guests don’t even have to concern themselves with. If a guest excuses him – or herself mid-meal, for example, there will be a fresh napkin waiting upon their return. “We're very keen on those things,” Tischmann said.

At Hugo’s Cellar at the Four Queens, 202 Fremont St., each new server receives a booklet covering about 20 points and must take written and practical exams, said Vincent Wiggins, sommelier. Periodic training seminars also are scheduled. “In most cases, at this restaurant, we do not hire a new waiter without some sort of gourmet experience.” Wiggins said.

Wiggins said, “Hugo’s Cellar uses a relatively straightforward place setting – salad fork, dinner fork, knife, spoon, bread-and-butter plate, bread-and-butter knife, napkin and wine glass – and we leave them pretty much on their own unless they ask.” In case of a faux pas — a patron who uses a dinner fork for his or her salad — “we would just replace it when the entree arrives,” Wiggins said.

Wiggins said he doesn't think we're collectively losing our grasp of etiquette. “I think people are more etiquette-savvy – maybe because they're eating out more,” he said.

At Rosemary's, 8125 W. Sahara Ave., service manager Rick Powers said servers spent two weeks in training before the restaurant opened seven months ago and receive continuous training, including pre-meal training before service starts each day. The restaurant’s best servers train new servers. “We also ask them to go out as much as they can and try to feel out service standards and what they like and don't like and bring it back to me,” he said.

Powers said his clients tend to be well-versed in etiquette. “Most are local,” he said. “Most are educated in food and dining.” But sometimes, he said, customers may think things are moving too slowly, not realizing that that's how it's supposed to be. “We're here for you to dine, not just eat and run,” he said.

Charlie Abowd, chef/owner of Adele’s in Carson City, said while he sees most people following the basic rules of etiquette, coping with modern challenges tends to elude them. “Today, I think the common etiquette mistake is that people don't have respect for time,” he said. “And cell phones are the biggest player in that. If you're sitting down and we're having a conversation, that totally interrupts the conversation you and I have.” 

“People don't realize the depths of that. If I got up and went over and sat down at another table and left you there abandoned, that would be the same thing. People do have table manners; I think it's ‘human manners’ that are lacking,” Abowd said. “Everything is going so fast that we've forgotten the common courtesies in life. It's such a ‘now’ society.” And Abowd, whose clientele generally includes a lot of people involved in state government, cautioned that loose lips can sink deals as well as ships.

“It’s always funny when you have new players in the Legislature — typically, new young lobbyists who don't know all the players, who will be sitting in close proximity and discussing openly their strategies,” he said. “I've seen a couple of times when strategies have been blown because of not knowing all the players. I had recently somebody talking about the Leadership when in fact, sitting within 3 feet of that person talking about the Leadership, was one of the Leadership,” Abowd said.

“I went back into the kitchen and had one of my staff tell that person that they had a phone call, and brought them back into the kitchen and told them who was sitting nearby. I got a Little Feat CD as a thank-you.”— Las Vegas Review-Journal, 1999

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

The Impetus of 90’s Etiquette Era?

On a flight from New York to Paris, the etiquette authority Letitia Baldrige found herself seated next to a nearly nude dude from California. “Bared to the waist, he was,” she said. “The flight attendants didn't say one thing. He was a surfer, very suntanned, and I must say he had a great body.” Contributing to the decline in decorum, in Ms. Baldrige's view, is a growing folksiness in the corporate culture. “Companies are telling employees to first-name everyone, to forget about deference to age and rank,” she said. “All of a sudden, it's not only the C.E.O., but the clergyman and the schoolteacher who are being called Joe. It's spreading like wildfire.”

Informality Reigns, And Good Manners Get a Bad Name – Was this the impetus for the eventual “1990’s Etiquette Era”?

THE pleasure of your company is requested in a new age of informality. Do not bother to R.S.V.P. Do not get done up in black tie. The mood just now is one of casualness in dress, in manners, on all fronts.

This is the time of the artfully unmade bed (rise, take up your downy duvet and toss it); the carry-out dinner; the telephone solicitor who calls at all hours and addresses you by your first name.

A date for the movies and Chinese food nowadays does not necessarily mean two distinct activities. Not in the age of informality. And not in New York, where any number of moviegoers are capable of eating Sichuan from a carton while following the action on the screen. The pros use chopsticks.

Q. Is the informality of the 1990’s anything like the informality of the 60’s?

A. No. Women wore T-shirts and no bras in the 60’s. Today it’s bras and no shirts.

In keeping with the new informality, affluent urbanites who once drove around town in BMW’s have switched to Jeep Cherokees and Ford Explorers. “It feels right now,” said Steven Meier, a Manhattan lawyer who travels to meetings in his trusty Explorer dressed in a sports jacket and khakis.

A blue suit with a Giorgio Armani label hangs in his office closet “in case I have to impress a client.” But he rarely reaches for it. “In today’s economy you don't want to wow ‘em with your elegant shoes, your gold ring, your fancy car,” Mr. Meier said. “That's not the style anymore.”

Along Park Avenue, social couples who once did time on the charity circuit now look upon opulent parties as boring or embarrassing. Let’s have some of that new informality, they say. Which may explain the number of informal charity parties on the calendar this season.

Take, for example, the Lenox Hill Neighborhood Association's Bingo and Barbecue Benefit in June. The association used to hold black-tie auctions and sales of antiques and artworks. A couple of years ago, it sponsored a benefit sale of watercolors from the collections of Louis XIV, the Empress Josephine, Napoleon and members of the French court.

Let them eat barbecue.

“There is a wish for greater informality in these gatherings,” said George Trescher, the marketing consultant who runs most of New York's big charity events. “Particularly if you're trying to mix groups of young and older guests.”

Mr. Trescher, who was tieless at the time, said the dress code has been unraveling for years now. But jeans at the theater? The ballet? The opera? “Yes, yes,” he said. “What's new is that nobody looks askance at it. It's laissez-faire.”

Heads did not turn unduly when Kevin Walz took an aisle seat in the orchestra at the Metropolitan Opera the other night. He was wearing wool pants, no jacket and a plaid shirt unbuttoned at the neck to reveal his undershirt.

“What a bum, huh?” he said, stroking his chin. “I didn't even shave.”

Mr. Walz, a furniture designer, was dressed for a rock concert he planned to attend after “The Marriage of Figaro.” He said a trend toward piggybacking cultural events might have something to do with the new informality.

“Last month I went to the ballet in jeans for an evening of Stravinsky and then down to the Ritz,” he said. ”I snuck out five minutes early so I wouldn't miss the Pixies.”

To observe the new informality on the move, hang around in an airport terminal. Count the sneakers, the shorts, the sweatsuits, even in business class.

“We were talking about that the other day, coming back from Barbados,” said Sisi Cahan of Manhattan, a frequent flier long before they had clubs. “People used to look terrific traveling, and now they look ghastly. I haven't seen anyone attractive in an airport in years.”

On a flight from New York to Paris, the etiquette authority Letitia Baldrige found herself seated next to a nearly nude dude from California.

“Bared to the waist, he was,” she said. “The flight attendants didn't say one thing. He was a surfer, very suntanned, and I must say he had a great body.”

Contributing to the decline in decorum, in Ms. Baldrige's view, is a growing folksiness in the corporate culture. “Companies are telling employees to first-name everyone, to forget about deference to age and rank,” she said. “All of a sudden, it's not only the C.E.O., but the clergyman and the schoolteacher who are being called Joe. It's spreading like wildfire.”

Ms. Baldrige, who lives in Washington and lectures around the country, went on to say that “down here the diplomats try to hold onto some formality in entertaining, but it's getting worse and worse.”

“Some people don't even bother to R.S.V.P.,” she said. “Other people accept for seated black-tie dinners and don't show up. Or they show up with small children. ‘Oh, I couldn't get a baby sitter -- knew you wouldn't mind.’”

For an academic look at the reasons behind the new informality, put in a call to Michael T. Marsden, a professor of popular culture at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.

A secretary answered the phone, informally. (“This is Sylvia.”)

The caller asked for Professor Marsden. (“Hi, this is Mike.”)

Professor Marsden cautioned against comparing the informality of the 1960’s, which was real and deep and wide, to the informality of the 90’s. It could be one of those behavioral blips on the East and West Coasts that never go anywhere.

“In the 60’s, wearing blue jeans was identifying with the working-class culture,” he said. “In today’s, world the up-and-coming executive is supposed to aspire to the leisure life. What better way to show this than to wear a sweatsuit? It's costuming.”

Nonetheless, Professor Marsden went on, society has thrown off some formal trappings taken on in the 80’s. “But not all,” he said. “Look at weddings. Formal weddings are on the rise. As for funerals, when people are laid out at wakes, they're generally dressed formally. It's not likely you’ll find somebody being buried in their sweatsuit.”

In any case, elaborate entertaining is out in New York. No more putting on the dog for company. Caterers who used to gussie up trays of hors d'oeuvres with foie gras medallions say they are making meatloaf, mashed potatoes and beans. “But beans don't have to be beige or boring,” said Susan Simon, whose catering company on the Lower East Side has always been known for its stylish and informal food.

And guests like Mr. Walz, the jeans-at-the-ballet man, find the down-home feeling refreshing. “You even see Pyrex on the table now,” he said. “People are much more casual about entertaining. They're acknowledging that life is tough in New York. What's important is that we're all together, having dinner. So what if there are a dozen kids underfoot and the centerpiece is daisies?”

When not dining at home, some busy New Yorkers are dining out, informally, while doing something else or waiting to do something else. In coin laundries, in bank lines, in doctors' offices, everywhere there is the crinkle of foil unfolding, the snap of aluminum cans opening.

Subways, always informal, have become more so with commuters breakfasting on bagels and coffee and applying major makeup and nail polish. On the F train the other day, Lucinda McBride blotted her lips with a tissue, smiled and said, “My mother said never put on lipstick in public.” She went on to apply eye shadow and mascara as the train rumbled from Brooklyn toward Manhattan.

“This is how I get ready for the office,” Ms. McBride said, studying her face in a mirror. “I've got two kids under 6.”

That's nothing, according to Phyllis Hall, who works for a trade magazine in Manhattan and commutes on a No. 68 N.J. Transit bus with a man who manages to change from sports clothes to a business suit on the turnpike.

“By the time we come out of the Lincoln Tunnel, he's in full business attire,” she said. “He even does cuff links.”

Here is the new informality personified. Except for the cuff links. They must go. – The New York Times, April 1, 1992

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

When Respect Grew for Manners

Erasmus of Rotterdam ~ The Father of Children's Etiquette Instructors … The bronze statue of Erasmus, in Rotterdam. Created by Hendrick de Keyser in 1622, it replaced a stone statue from 1557.

New Respectability For Manners; Scholars Tackle a Topic Long Thought Too Trivial for All but Fussbudgets

The subject of manners once seemed worthy of serious attention. The authors of the Talmud took up such topics as burping, yawning and bad breath. Erasmus wrote the 16th-century equivalent of a best seller on civility and Edmund Burke considered manners more important than laws.

But somewhere between the Renaissance and the late 20th century, the topic got a bad name. Manners came to be viewed as trivial, hypocritical and superficial. Heavy thinkers abandoned manners to the authors of etiquette books, with their fussing about finger bowls and the evils of blowing on soup.

Now an interest in the subject, which once preoccupied the middle classes, is back in vogue, and not just among politicians like Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who earlier this week went so far as to invoke Plato in his continuing quest to make New York City a more orderly, civil and, well, mannerly place.

Judith Rodin, the president of the University of Pennsylvania, has convened a 48-member national commission, made up heavily of academics, that is in the midst of a three-to-five-year study of what some believe is an explosion of incivility degrading the quality of public life.

At Johns Hopkins University, P. M. Forni, a professor of Italian literature and culture, has organized a wide-ranging project that includes a course on civility, manners and politeness. It also includes research on civility in schools and in health care, and efforts to encourage scholarly work in the field.

Last fall, the university offered the course not only to its own undergraduates but also to inmates of a maximum-security prison in Jessup, Md. Having spent the semester studying texts like Erving Goffman's, “Interaction Ritual,” both groups came together at the end to discuss what they had learned.

And next month, Johns Hopkins plans to hold a three-day, international symposium titled “Reassessing Civility: Forms and Values at the End of the Century,” with speakers ranging from historians who have written on manners to Judith Martin, the author of the Miss Manners columns and books.

“Manners were expelled from respectable scholarly thinking: ‘Who would be interested in a stupid thing like that?’” Ms. Martin said in a recent interview. “Never mind that the answers are Burke, Mill, Emerson, Aristotle, Cicero, Castiglione, Erasmus, Locke.”

There is indeed a long tradition of serious writing on manners, not the least of which were three centuries of “courtesy books” originally written to instruct young princes but later directed to the sons of the upper classes.

One of the best known of the genre was Erasmus’, “De Civilitate Morum Puerilium” (“On Civility in Boys”), first published in 1526, which went into more than 130 editions and covered everything from dental hygiene and the importance of clean fingernails at the dinner table to when and how to spit.

A wide-eyed look suggests stupidity, Erasmus advised. If mucus falls on the ground while blowing one’s nose with two fingers, step on it, fast. When offered a communal tankard, wipe your mouth first. If food sticks to your teeth, remove it (with a quill or a toothpick, not a knife).

“The whole idea of manners was linked to civilization,” said Richard L. Bushman, a Columbia University historian and the author of “The Refinement of America” (Alfred A. Knopf, 1992). “It would be listed right along with the growth of art, science and law as a sign that we were civilized.”

But that view changed, at least among scholars. Michael Curtin, a historian in Oakland, Calif., has traced the shift to the late-18th and early-19th centuries, when he believes the long association between manners and morals was irrevocably broken.

In an article published in the Journal of Modern History in September 1985, Mr. Curtin in particular blamed Lord Chesterfield's courtesy book, “Letters to His Son,” published in 1774, which Mr. Curtin said “appeared to represent manners at their most cynical, expedient and immoral light.” In the book, manners seemed to be entirely in the service of self-interest and self-aggrandizement rather than of any broader civic good.

At the same time, Mr. Curtin suggested, Romanticism helped doom the courtesy book. Cosmopolitan standards of civility became suspect. As he put it, the Romantic quest for deep and authentic feeling, uninhibited by propriety and social convention, was destructive of manners.

Others, including Mr. Bushman, trace the decline of serious attention to the subject to the rejection of the formality and triviality of late-Victorian manners. “We had to reduce it in scholarly importance, so we just cast it aside,” he said. “They were seen as something curious and quaint.”

But in 1978, a history of manners that was then 40 years old, “The Civilizing Process” (Blackwell) by Norbert Elias, was published in English for the first time. Many scholars say has since inspired new interest in manners and helped transform the way they are seen.

First published in German in the late 1930's, the book followed the evolution of manners in Western Europe since the Middle Ages. Mr. Elias, a sociologist and social historian, tracked what he described as a rising level of shame about bodily functions and restraint in public, and traced it to the development of the modern state.

The emergence of the state, with its monopoly on violence and the growing interdependence of its members, necessitated greater degrees of individual self-control, Mr. Elias suggested. People began to modify their approach to everything from eating and scratching to spitting and sex.

Tracing the Fork And the Spittoon

Mr. Elias tracked such things as the arrival of the fork at the end of the Middle Ages, which put distance between diner and dined upon; the increasing restrictions on the way knives were used, the introduction of the nightdress, the handkerchief, the chamber pot, the spittoon.

Since the book’s appearance in English, a number of scholars, many of them influenced by Mr. Elias, have published books that have tended to view manners as a source of power or political authority and as a reflection of larger tensions in developing societies.

“Elias opened the door to a new kind of cultural history,” John F. Kasson, a historian at the University of North Carolina, has written. That kind of history, he said, is “keenly attuned to changing standards of emotional expression, bodily control and personal interaction, and seeking to correlate these with larger changes in social structure.”

In his own book, “Rudeness and Civility” (The Noonday Press, 1990), an examination of manners in 19th-century urban America, Mr. Kasson challenges the idea that so-called improvements in manners necessarily represented an unalloyed good.

“I wish to stress how established codes of behavior have often served in unacknowledged ways as checks against a fully democratic order,” Mr. Kasson wrote, “and in support of special interests, institutions of privilege, and structures of domination.”

As an example, he cites the case of the Astor Place Opera House, built in New York City in the 1840’s to embody the latest standards of etiquette and refinement. The house was “aristocratized,” with open seating eliminated and red damask seats sold only by subscription.

To exclude women of dubious respectability, Mr. Kasson writes, women were admitted only in the company of men. Men were expected to comply with a strict dress code that included evening dress, a fresh vest and kid gloves — a calculated slap, Mr. Kasson says, at working- and lower-class men.

“To look at manners in the 19th century is to realize that so-called good manners were often at the expense of a lot of deference to a broadly speaking privileged middle class,” Mr. Kasson said in an interview. “If class is the dirty secret in American life, manners is a way we launder it.”

Mr. Kasson is hardly the only current scholar of manners who acknowledges a debt to Mr. Elias. Another is Nancy Bentley, an assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, who in 1995 published “The Ethnography of Manners” (Cambridge), an analysis of the fiction of Henry James and Edith Wharton.

“People like Elias say there is a doubleness about manners,” Ms. Bentley said recently. “They are really about how you get along in a group. At the same time, these acts of gentility are also codes that do reinscribe power in some ways, even if they make for more peaceful coexistence.”

Table manners, for example, thus become arbitrary codes. “Insiders know these codes,” Ms. Bentley said. “If you don't, you won't be recognized as an insider. It becomes a way that you can have a kind of identity and recognition and joining of power that outsiders aren't able to claim.”

Ms. Bentley's sister, Amy Bentley, a cultural historian and assistant professor in the department of nutrition and food studies at New York University, has studied table manners in some detail. In a recent interview, she said she shared the view that manners are about power.

“They're necessary, but the ways they’re devised and developed can be about distancing people from one another,” she said. “Who is at the head of the table, who is carving, who waits until they are spoken to — all those kinds of rules about gender, age and other things.

“So I'm not anti-manners,” she said. “Because manners are good. But the ways that they've been used or developed can show interesting things about what people were anxious about in the society and who they were anxious about.”

A correction was made on

March 5, 1998: An article in the Arts and Ideas pages on Saturday about recent scholarly interest in manners referred incorrectly to the role of P. M. Forni in starting the civility project at Johns Hopkins University. He was one organizer; he shared that role with Giulia Sissa, a classics professor. –By Janny Scott, NYT, 1998

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

Serving Etiquette in 1996 Tableware

Was this “zany etiquette?” The New York Times thought so in 1996, even though the United States, along with other parts of the world, was seeing a tremendous resurgence of etiquette books and etiquette schools.

Zany Etiquette in the Gravy

New York Times, 1966

“YOU get the feeling Jane Timberlake was told as a child to sit up straight one time too many. The San Francisco product designer is offering a tabletop collection called ‘Wild Mannered,’ consisting of napkins and chunky plates decorated with dozens of hopelessly demanding, but funny, etiquette dictums, which make you want to leave your elbows on the table or eat salad with the dinner fork. Dishes and linens are sold individually or in five-piece place settings at Mxyplyzyk, 125 Greenwich Avenue (at 13th Street) or the Guggenheim Museum Store.” — New York Times, 1996

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

Late 20th C. State of U.S. Etiquette

If you’re part of the Generation X crowd or younger, you can thank your parents for your lacking decorum. (Is there nothing that parents can’t be blamed for?) Manners mavens say the hippie ‘60s— when everything conventional was rejected— was the start of the decline. Etiquette experts say the deterioration continued into the 1970s and ‘80s, when people were too busy or just didn’t care about their behavior.

With the holiday season soon in full swing, chances are you’ve experienced —or will— this dining play-by-play:

It begins with a fellow diner attacking a meal, grunting as he spears and saws his way through a piece of meat. Painfully, it continues as he heaves gobs of mashed potatoes into his gaping mouth, stopping only to savor the defining moment of gustatory satisfaction— a big, juicy buuurrrp.

Where were these table barbarians reared? Perhaps in the Land of Piggy-Piggy. You know, that place where chewing open-mouthed, using the back of the hand as a napkin and employing a toothpick to catch any after-dinner treats are celebrated activities.

The fact is, a large portion of our adult population lacks some of the basic social skills that separate human from beast. And their children are following by example.

Shocked by the way little Johnny downs his lime Jell-O or mashes meatballs into his mouth? Well, don’t be too appalled. Chances are the tyke got some of his best lessons at home.

“Ninety percent of manners is role modeling,” says Joan K. Hopper, who holds etiquette programs for children, adults and the business community.

If you’re part of the Generation X crowd or younger, you can thank your parents for your lacking decorum. (Is there nothing that parents can’t be blamed for?) Manners mavens say the hippie ‘60s— when everything conventional was rejected— was the start of the decline. Etiquette experts say the deterioration continued into the 1970s and ‘80s, when people were too busy or just didn’t care about their behavior.

“For the past 20 years, I’ve watched the decline of human behavior,” says Letitia Baldrige, an expert on manners who has served as social secretary at the U.S. embassies in Paris and Rome. “It’s just amazing— amazing!— the things people think are acceptable at the table and even in other parts of our lives.”

A decline in the importance the country places on table manners has led to a generation that believes eating with fingers is cute and that placing elbows on the table is OK if you’re really tired.

“Good manners should have never gone away,” Hopper says. “Now we have to play catch-up.”

In defense of those who rebelled against social decorum, there are other reasons for the manners mess. The ever-more-rushed pace of society and increasing number of single-parent households where the parent works most of the time and the children often eat in front of a TV or computer are also to blame for our diminishing demeanor.

Of course, few people are willing to admit they have poor manners. But practically everyone has a friend who does.

Etiquette experts say social skills can give a person an upper hand in the job market. “People judge each other on how they carry and present themselves,” Hopper says. “That includes potential friends and employers.”

The good news? Etiquette consultants say more people want to learn. “I’m especially seeing it within the business community,” Hopper says. “Companies are really concerned about setting a good example when traveling abroad.”

“I expect things to change for the better,” Baldrige says. “I really think we should expect a social revolution.” — Helen Ubinas, Times, 1995

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

Russia’s 1990s Etiquette Revolution

In today’s class-conscious new Russia, however, refinement is on the rise, and those pondering careers in international business or diplomacy are seeking to rectify their deficit of graces. From social etiquette classes that have been added to public school curricula to resurrected pre-revolutionary finishing schools like those within the New University of Humanities founded here by Natalia Nesterova, there is growing interest— and income— in the teaching of proper manners.
—Photo source, Instagram

Minding Manners in Moscow

Vera Ignatieva’s lecture on how proper young ladies accept an invitation to dance is interrupted by a door slamming behind a tardy pupil. Ignatieva halts the culprit in her tracks with a glare as powerful as a stun gun.

“Is that any way for a cultured person to enter a room?” she demands of the trembling 7-year-old arriving for a first lesson. “Go back outside and try again— this time in a civilized manner!”

Across town, the latecomer is slightly older, but the reproving glance from Alena Gil is as withering as Ignatieva’s. “You are late again, Vika. And furthermore,” says the appalled etiquette teacher, “how dare you come into my classroom with gum in your mouth!”

Slammed doors, snapping jaws, slouchy posture and sloppy table manners are under attack in places such as Ignatieva’s Ballroom Dancing and Court Etiquette School and the Institute for Noble Young Ladies, where Gil teaches socially aspiring teens.

But after eight decades in which society put more stock in a young person’s skill handling a forklift than in his or her way with a salad fork, the purveyors of polish at Russia’s revitalized charm schools concede that they have their work cut out for them.

Boorish behavior was a hallmark of the Bolshevik era, when civility was thrashed by the coinciding brutalities of war, widespread poverty and social leveling. The remnants of the Russian aristocracy fled abroad to escape exile or execution.

In today’s class-conscious new Russia, however, refinement is on the rise, and those pondering careers in international business or diplomacy are seeking to rectify their deficit of graces.

From social etiquette classes that have been added to public school curricula to resurrected pre-revolutionary finishing schools like those within the New University of Humanities founded here by Natalia Nesterova, there is growing interest— and income— in the teaching of proper manners.

“We could hardly have operated during the Communist era, when the very concept of nobility was officially targeted for destruction,” says Nesterova from beneath the net veil of a milliner’s fanciful creation. “But now that it is possible, it is all the more important that we prepare a new generation of young women to be credits to their families, to their future husbands, to their employers and, most importantly, to themselves.”

The Institute for Noble Young Ladies, which is one branch of her private university, was reconstituted three years ago on the reputation of an imperial-era boarding school that trained the daughters of wealthy merchants and noblemen in the czar’s court.

Nothing but that somewhat antiquated ideal survived the traumas of communism, says Nesterova, and the institute now strives to incorporate the modern demands of society into the structure of education in more traditional spheres.

“In today’s conditions, it is not wise for a woman to be without the intellectual means to compete in the workplace, even if she expects to be a homemaker,” she says. “That is why we have added courses in office management and business to our cultural repertoire.”

Sexology, family planning and body-shaping aerobics are also new twists to the classic agenda, but they are additions graduates need to deal with modern realities, Nesterova says.

Vika Zavalnaya plans to study law at Moscow State University beginning next year, but she enrolled at Nesterova’s institute at the urging of her older brother, a successful businessman who supports her and their widowed mother.

“This is the kind of instruction that will give me an advantage in my profession,” says the exuberant 17-year-old, not yet weaned of her affection for gum. “When you work with clients, especially foreigners, it’s important to know how to conduct yourself gracefully in a restaurant as well as the office.”

Looking for Employees With Polish

Russian and foreign hiring executives say they are on the lookout for employees with polish and that something as simple as a thank-you note after an interview can affect their choices.

“Knowing how to present oneself is as important as professional and technical knowledge,” says Konstantin Korotov, head of personnel development here for Ernst & Young, the international accounting firm that employs 500 local professionals throughout the former Soviet Union. “We’ve always managed to recruit well-educated people, but we want those representing our firm in the CIS [Commonwealth of Independent States] to do so with the same level of quality and professionalism as we have in Sydney or Paris or Cleveland.”

For 15-year-old Nina Babicheva, a charm school diploma is the ticket into the most desirable social circles.

“I’m not very good at math or science. What I love here is the attention to art and culture,” says Babicheva, who is balancing the finishing school program with her high school education. “I don’t have any big career goals. If I have to work, I think I’d like to be a journalist. But what I would really like is to get married and be free to spend my whole day riding horses.”

Private finishing schools such as the institute in central Moscow remain beyond the means of the vast majority of families, even at what might seem a reasonable tuition by Western standards of $1,500 a year.

But programs tailored to local circumstances are growing alongside the charm-school courses for the well-heeled, including weekly etiquette classes introduced in most elementary schools over the past two years. It is mostly young women who have expressed interest in learning social graces, but some schools also aim to prepare boys for a more courtly environment.

“We are educating tomorrow’s business and social leaders, and we cannot do that properly with yesterday’s practices,” says Irina Sirina, vice principal of Moscow Elementary School No. 184 in the far northern suburb of Dmitrovsky. “Personal hygiene and good behavior were discussed in schools indirectly during the Communist era, but there was no encouragement of the individual at that time. Etiquette then existed only as another measure of conformance.”

Her school, like many other public institutions, has taken aim at the surly behavior exuded by older generations, in which even the most highly educated can be found spitting on the sidewalks or hunkering down over their dinner plates like prisoners. The hourlong classes cover both personal and social behavior, from good grooming to diction to table manners.

“In the past, etiquette was not considered important because the measure of an ideal student was his ability to multiply and write properly and learn by heart poems about Communist Party heroes,” says Marina Nayanova, deputy director of a private finishing school with 50 students in the provincial city of Kostroma, 250 miles east of Moscow. “We see how much children’s behavior has deteriorated, and parents now have to work so hard that the last thing they have time for is [worrying about] manners.”

Extensive instruction in the social graces tends to be limited to private schools, where tuition runs to thousands of dollars each year, or to hybrid institutions such as the Donskoy Military Academy, where commercial sponsors augment the fees paid by parents.

Ignatieva, who has been teaching ballroom dancing for 45 years and etiquette since it became politically safe to do so about a decade ago, accepts payment only as individual parents can afford it and relies on connections with the artistic elite to cover the rest of her expenses.

She teaches a few dozen children who come to her studio in small groups twice each week for dance instruction and brutally candid assessments of their social skills.

“All of the popular and elegant dances were forbidden under [Soviet dictator Josef] Stalin— the fox trot, the tango, everything, especially if it was foreign,” says the feisty proprietor of the children’s dance academy. “It wasn’t until a few years ago that there were enough of us to rise up and demand our dignity back.”

The ninth child in a poor family, Ignatieva learned how to behave in high society only after it was banished. She married the son of a count who had been driven into exile after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and acquired her knowledge of etiquette from a hidden book on English manners and in whispered lessons from her husband.

“What is nobility and how do you teach it?” asks the snow-haired widow who is long past retirement time but coy about age specifics. “Some are born with it, but it can also be acquired through learning, and one of the most elegant expressions of nobility is ballroom dancing.”

But to dance well requires self-confidence, elegance and poise— commodities she says were hard to come by in the Soviet era, which glorified the spartan lifestyle of the working class.

Those deficits have compelled Ignatieva to broaden her dance instruction to include a general education in social graces.

“You cannot act like a gentleman when you are dressed like a laborer,” Ignatieva admonishes a hapless and humiliated preteen who has come to her studio in jeans and black T-shirt.

Parents Learn Manners From Their Children

The young patrons of Ignatieva’s studio and at etiquette classes being offered across the country bear up determinedly despite the upbraiding, often because they are encouraged by their parents to take advantage of opportunities they never had.

Oksana Abramova, a homemaker whose 8-year-old daughter, Ella, is enrolled in an after-school etiquette class, confides in a visitor that she too is taking instruction— indirectly.

“We like it when she practices at home, because my husband and I are learning from her,” Abramova says of her daughter’s recent recitals on how to set the table.

Older students undertaking more extensive training for entrance into the new elite cite a need to find a middle ground between the crudeness of the past and the garish excesses of the present.

Gil, a former drama instructor who teaches posture and grooming at the Institute for Noble Young Ladies, helps her young charges learn to use makeup with moderation and to dress appropriately for the business environment that is currently populated more by those wearing leather miniskirts and spike heels than by devotees of tailored suits and silk blouses.

“We have many people in our society who are smart and capable, but in the future it will take more than that to be successful,” says 16-year-old Yekaterina Vorontsova, who wants to become a financial secretary after finishing her course work at the institute. “What we need isn’t just a matter of clothes and expensive cosmetics. What we need is sophistication.” — Los Angeles Times, 1997

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