“Modern Manners” and Informalities

Over the past 150 years, modern manners could almost be translated to “modern money” as newly wealthy newcomers were purposely excluded from social groups, until manners could be sufficiently relaxed to allow the newcomers entry into the hierarchy – The kind of politeness that we call “formality”deliberately keeps people apart. Its purpose is partly to prevent prying, and to slow down the process of familiarization in order to give each party time to appraise the other. But apartness creates distinction, so that formality also prevents or defers relationships between two people or two groups who want to be separate, or whose status is hierarchically differentiated. 
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Modern manners increasingly force us to be casual. We have no choice but to comply: the lowering of decorum and the flattening out of what the anthropologist Mary Douglas once called “intricacy” rule us as imperiously as protocol ever did. Politeness, whether formal or informal, has always involved manipulating social distance.

The kind of politeness that we call “formality”deliberately keeps people apart. Its purpose is partly to prevent prying, and to slow down the process of familiarization in order to give each party time to appraise the other. But apartness creates distinction, so that formality also prevents or defers relationships between two people or two groups who want to be separate, or whose status is hierarchically differentiated.

Informal manners, on the other hand, reduce distance; when they consciously impose themselves in opposition to formality, they express scorn for differentiation by status. Where informality reigns, there is less likelihood of either error or criticism. But rules there must be, otherwise there would be no means left of communicating with others or relating to them. — Margaret Visser in “The Rituals of Dinner,” 1991

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

Etiquette, Cancel Culture and Rudeness

This was only written in 1991, but do some of Margaret Visser’s final words from the post script in her marvelous book, “The Rituals of Dinner,” still ring true? With the current climate of “cancel culture” and the rudeness often seen in the gleeful joy of “taking someone down,” due to what is most often differences in opinion, Etiquipedia is, sadly, not so sure…
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 “One of the guiding principles of modernity is mobility — the opportunity to move up the social scale, as well as to flee from any social “scene” we find uncomfortable and unaccepting... We have greatly reduced the likelihood that anyone need play a predetermined role on a ‘stage’ dominated from the start by people born to power... None of us need tolerate surveillance and adverse judgements from people who have set themselves up as arbiters of elegance. We can move away if they disapprove or try to put us down.”

How Rude Are We? 

Are we ruder than other societies are? Are we ruder than we were in the past? There is increasing concern for manners in the modern West: newspaper articles protest about the lack of them; the number of books telling people how to behave and their enormous sales attest to an anxiety on this score which rivals that experienced in the nineteenth century; and a new and expanding business is the etiquette industry, where people formally, and for a fee, teach protocol and the arts of the dinner table to ambitious business men and women. It is realized, in the commercial world at least, that bad manners might actually spoil a corporate image, hamper a deal, impede mobility; good manners might make a competitive difference. Since bad manners can be corrected, the demeanour of the staff is one of the things a careful company can try to polish and control.

The idea is to pinpoint trouble spots, moments where even we, with our insistence on informality, set up specific expectations which could trip up the unwary or the simply ignorant. We must know, for example, that at a formal meal served by waiters, serving dishes are likely to appear, silently and without warning, from the left; the serving spoon and fork must be used in a correct and unobtrusive manner to remove a portion of the food presented (do not take too long choosing your portion!); when eating is done, plates will be removed from the right. Most people are right-handed, and this rule is for their convenience. 

If plates should be presented already loaded with food, however, they are set down from the diner's right, and taken away from the left. The need to be prepared for such moments is heightened because formal meals are unusual, and important for reasons that go beyond eating for nourishment; and because etiquette involving the presence of servants is not everyday experience. We do eat out at restaurants, however, where practice in old-fashioned formality is available to us, as is the surveillance of our manners by people outside our families.

One of the guiding principles of modernity is mobility— the opportunity to move up the social scale, as well as to flee from any social “scene” we find uncomfortable and unaccepting. Physical movement facilitates social mobility; it is possible to live in an inexpensive neighbourhood, for instance, and still drive to a job in a smart area of the city. We have greatly reduced the likelihood that anyone need play a predetermined role on a “stage” dominated from the start by people born to power. Modern cities set out to offer many alternatives-a choice of “stages” upon one of which a person may hope someday to shine, and plenty of escape routes from unwanted constraints. None of us need tolerate surveillance and adverse judgements from people who have set themselves up as arbiters of elegance. We can move away if they disapprove or try to put us down. — Margaret Visser, 1991

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

Profiles in Etiquette — Margaret Visser

“The Rituals of Dinner” is a compendium of information about the world at table, from the Sherpas who send a child to summon guests to a dinner party (thus reducing the number of rejections, since the child knows neither the exact time nor the reason for the party, and is too young to be trusted with a reluctant guest’s contrived excuse) to the London hostess of the 1920s who sent handwritten invitations, again and again, until an elusive invitee, exhausted, gave in.
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Review of “The Rituals of Dinner: The Origins, Evolution, Eccentricities and Meaning of Table Manners,” By Margaret Visser

Author Margaret Visser writes on the history, anthropology, and mythology of everyday life. Born in 1940 in South Africa, she attended school in Zambia Zimbabwe, in France at the Sorbonne and the University of Toronto Canada where she earned a PhD in Classics. She now spends her time at homes in Toronto, Paris, and South West France.
— Photo, Etiquipedia’s private library

The memory is about five years old, but vivid: A woman takes a table for one at a trendy Italian restaurant, orders a Caesar salad, and proceeds to eat it with her fingers. She picks up one long leaf of silvery green Romaine after another, always grasping the stem end, and then chews her way from the top of the leaf to her fingers.

The only thing more remarkable than her choice of utensils was the other diners’ reaction to it. All of us watched her. It was impossible not to. In a room full of people who were eating in the accepted manner, with a lot of gnashing flatware, this woman was breaking the unspoken rules. We were titillated and appalled. Who was this stranger, and how had she gotten in?

Food rules are a reassuring discipline, a way to prove who we are or to demonstrate who we’d like to be, a societal shorthand that betrays broad cultural attitudes. You are not only what you eat, but when, where, why, how and with whom. Margaret Visser may be a professor of classical literature at the University of Toronto by trade, but she is at heart a journalist, determined to answer the five W’s and an H that are the bedrock of that profession. To her credit, and to the reader’s unending, startled delight, she has succeeded.

“The Rituals of Dinner” is a compendium of information about the world at table, from the Sherpas who send a child to summon guests to a dinner party (thus reducing the number of rejections, since the child knows neither the exact time nor the reason for the party, and is too young to be trusted with a reluctant guest’s contrived excuse) to the London hostess of the 1920s who sent handwritten invitations, again and again, until an elusive invitee, exhausted, gave in.

Visser is a partisan of ritual, an admirer of structure at a time when newspaper stories herald the end of the family meal, and the at-home dinner party seems likely to become a museum diorama. She is aware that manners can be constraining, as in the story of the 15-year-old boy who humiliated his father by eating spaghetti with his hands at a business dinner, and was packed off to boarding school as a result. 

She knows etiquette can be foolish, as she shows in a wickedly insightful section called “Learning to Behave,” in which she examines how we cope with our children’s heinous crime of not being miniature adults. But she acknowledges the more important freeing aspects of ritual, of feasts that are “celebrations of relationship among the diners, and . . . expressions of order, knowledge, competence, sympathy and consensus at least about important aspects of the value system that supports the group.”

Manners have belonged to the masses of the Western World since 1530, when Erasmus published de civilitate morum puerilium (On the Civility of the Behavior of Boys), which offered instruction on everything from table manners to behavior in the bedroom; before that, manners were the province of the social elite.

We have managed, in the intervening centuries, to act as though we made up the eternal rules of this game, and one of the best things about Visser’s book is the way she deftly skewers Western pretentiousness. She need only explain the genealogy of the chopstick--called kuai-tzu (fast fellows) by Chinese boatmen, and hashi (bridge) by the Japanese, since they close the small gap between the lifted bowl and the mouth--to make the reader realize the idiocy of trying to transport rice from a flat plate, at table level, as we do.

She is as sharp as the knives that symbolize, to her, the violence that lurks just beneath the service of every meal, and requires the imposition of manners to keep one of us from slicing up the lout who refused to pass the potatoes.

The wry tone of “The Rituals of Dining” is reminiscent of the scene in the Japanese film “Tampopo” in which a group of proper young women are being taught to eat pasta properly. Their instinct is to lift the dish and slurp appreciatively, but their teacher cautions them to swirl with a fork, lift, and chew silently, a discipline that dissolves quickly because it makes no sense to them. The same foodstuff but different cultures— and Visser has seemingly endless permutations with which to enlighten the reader. A dining room chair (or a stool, or a dirt floor, or whatever the seat of choice happens to be) is a wonderful vehicle for a trip around the world, and through time.

Is there anything missing? It seems a quibbling question. Visser’s range of knowledge is so broad that it’s impossible to know what to ask for: Since I never knew it was acceptable behavior to place bitten pieces of meat back in the boiling pot for warmth at an Inuit feast, I could hardly have faulted Visser had she omitted that morsel of information. There may be a detail out there that escaped her, but I defy anyone to name it. Having been served a sumptuous meal, the sated reader would be perverse to inquire if there was anything left in the literary kitchen.

The only thing that Visser does leave to the reader’s imagination is the deep emotional component of some of the rituals she describes. Yes, a seating arrangement might have everything to do with power, but some food rituals spring from a more intimate source, from the link between food and the life we share with the people who eat at our tables. Take, for example, the use of candles. “Candles last their predestined, visible length,” writes Visser. “They represent spans of time for us: a lifetime, with the flame as life itself, fragile but still alight (they become, with this meaning, potent symbols during political demonstrations); or a significant period of time, as when candles on a birthday cake mean ‘years lived.’ ”

That brief, lyrical passage, with its imitations of mortality, of the delicate ways in which we both celebrate and deny our temporary status, was almost shocking to read, sandwiched in between so many other bits of information. Perhaps the best way to approach “The Rituals of Dinner” is as thought were a meal shared with a remarkable friend— slowly, reflectively, savoring every exchange, not just for what it says but also for what it implies. — By Karen Stabiner, 1991

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

Dining History and Knife Etiquette

A silver and steel “bird” knife, which was a forerunner of the serrated-edged, steak knife
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According to Tallement Des Réaux, Richelieu was responsible for the rounding off the points on table knife blades in France in 1669, apparently to prevent their use as toothpicks, but probably also to discourage assassinations at meals. It became illegal for cutlers to make pointed dinner knives or for innkeepers to lay them on their tables. Other countries soon followed suit. Pointed knives for all diners were later to return to the dining room table, but as steak-knives, which have a special image...” 
– Margaret Visser

Ever since the 16th century there has been a taboo against pointing a knife at our faces. It is rude, of course, to point at anybody with a knife or a fork, or even a spoon; it is also very bad form to hold a knife and fork in the fists so that they stand upright. But pointing a knife at ourselves is viewed with special horror, as Norbert Elias has observed. I think that one reason for this is that we have learned only very recently not to use our knives for placing food in our mouths: we are still learning, and we therefore reinforce our decision by means of a taboo. We think we hate seeing people placing themselves even in the slightest jeopardy, but actually we fervently hope they will not spoil the new rule and let us all down by taking to eating with their knives again.

For the fact is, that people have commonly eaten food impaled on the points of their knives, or carried it to their mouth as balanced on blades; the fork is in this respect merely a variant of the knife. With the coming of forks, knife points became far less useful than they had been; their potential danger soon began in consequence to seem positively barbaric. The first steps in the subduing of the dinner knife were taken in the 17th century, when the two cutting edges of the dagger-like knife were occasionally reduced to one. The blunt side became an upper edge, which is not threatening to the fingers when they are holding knives in the polite manner.

According to Tallement Des Réaux, Richelieu was responsible for the rounding off the points on table knife blades in France in 1669, apparently to prevent their use as toothpicks, but probably also to discourage assassinations at meals. It became illegal for cutlers to make pointed dinner knives or for innkeepers to lay them on their tables. Other countries soon followed suit. Pointed knives for all diners were later to return to the dining room table, but as steak-knives, which have a special image, linked deliberately with red meat and “getting down to business” when hungry. They are still quite rustic in connotation. — Margaret Visser, The Rituals of Dinner

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

Etiquette and Hands at the Table

Renaissance etiquette and one's hands at the table– On the Continent of Europe, propriety enjoins diners to sit with both hand in full view of the company; most correctly, unused hands should rest on the table's edge, being visible only from the wrists. 

Anglo-Saxon table manners allow, even prefer, the diner should eat where only one hand need be used, with the left hand lying on his or her lap.  It is a limitation upon one's ability to grab things, like the decision to use only the right hand, or only three fingers.  On the Continent of Europe, however, propriety enjoins diners to sit with both hand in full view of the company; most correctly, unused hands should rest on the table's edge, being visible only from the wrists.  (Erasmus had commanded boys to “have both hands on the table, not clasped together, nor on the plate.”)  The Anglo-Saxon custom of permitting guests to sit with one hand hidden seems, to Continentals, at best a sad sign of naiveté.

One reason for hands being kept in sight used to be the people had to learn not to scratch at table. Della Casa’s, “Galateo” says, for instance, that waiters were not to scratch their heads– or anything else –“nor place their hands on any part of the body which is kept covered, nor even appear to do so, as do some careless servants who hold them inside their shirt or keep them behind their backs hidden under their clothes. They must rather keep their hands in sight and out of suspicion... .” 

This rule holds even more strongly for diners, who are constantly warned not to stroke their beards, twiddle their mustaches, rub and pat themselves, or scratch their heads. Erasmus says it is unsightly to scratch, especially if it is done through habit rather than necessity. John Russell's “Boke of Nurture” counsels against “clawing your back as if after a flea; or your head as if after a louse.” Fleas, like gristle in the mouth or fibers wedged between the teeth, are to be ignored by polite people. The discomfort they cause must be heroically endured and not only hidden from view, but kept from the suspicions of others. – Margaret Visser’s, 1991, “The Rituals of Dinner” 

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