A confession that will surprise nobody who’s been reading this blog for more than fifteen minutes: I am terrible at reading people. If there is a wrong thing to say, or a bad time to say it, those are the words that have already formed themselves on my tongue. So, when Miss Manners’ Guide to Excrutiatingly Correct Behavior first appeared in the late 1970s, I bought it (in hardback!) and read it cover-to-cover. It was a wise investment, and one I would recommend to others with my inherent weakness in primate psychology. Judith Martin has a gift for explaining the strategy behind “etiquette” — not just the minutiae of the normal social codes that elude so many of us, but the logic behind them.
Ergo, I am happy to say that I owe commentor MattF (& Betty Cracker) a hat tip for recommending Paul Ford’s “How to Be Polite“:
…[A]fter two years at the end of an arduous corporate project, slowly turning a thousand red squares in a spreadsheet to yellow, then green, my officemate turned to me and said: “I thought you were a terrible ass-kisser when we started working together.”
She paused and frowned. “But it actually helped get things done. It was a strategy.” (That is how an impolite person gives a compliment. Which I gladly accepted.)…
When I was in high school I used to read etiquette manuals. Emily Post and so forth. I found the manuals interesting and pretty funny… What I found most appealing was the way that the practice of etiquette let you draw a protective circle around yourself and your emotions. By following the strictures in the book, you could drag yourself through a terrible situation and when it was all over, you could throw your white gloves in the dirty laundry hamper and move on with your life. I figured there was a big world out there and etiquette was going to come in handy along the way…
People silently struggle from all kinds of terrible things. They suffer from depression, ambition, substance abuse, and pretension. They suffer from family tragedy, Ivy-League educations, and self-loathing. They suffer from failing marriages, physical pain, and publishing. The good thing about politeness is that you can treat these people exactly the same. And then wait to see what happens. You don’t have to have an opinion. You don’t need to make a judgment. I know that doesn’t sound like liberation, because we live and work in an opinion-based economy. But it is. Not having an opinion means not having an obligation. And not being obligated is one of the sweetest of life’s riches…
MattR
Finally listening to this witness talking with Lawrence O’Donnell and I think I am gonna puke.
Dog On Porch
My mom (i.e. “she who taught me to read”) left an Emily Post etiquette book laying around because she knew I was a reader. Some of it stuck, too.
NotMax
Given a choice between Norman Vincent Peale and Stephen Potter, would choose to read Potter every time.
mtiffany
@MattR: Lawrence O’Donnell has the same effect on me as well.
srv
BJ commenters, etiquettely challenged or sociopaths? You Decide.
To be impolite, based on the earlier responses, I am going to enjoy the reborn Angry John.
Whether John ends up teaching the socially incorigable masses a thing or two or ends up behind bars, I cannot hazard.
FREEDOM IS JUST ANOTHER WORD FOR NOTHING LEFT TO LOSE.
Those people on the road, at Walmart, at the dealership… they’re all just bars on the cage man.
Ruckus
Politeness and etiquette certainly have their place and are the nice social lubricants that can smooth the rough edges of life. But no amount of politeness and etiquette will fix some situations. Not saying those need C4 to fix but sometimes being direct, open and honest is what is required. There are places where politeness and etiquette take on a language of their own so that they really only mask the rudeness, not replace it. Thank You So Very Much said in a southern tone with the emphasis on so very and a lingering much is a nice way to say Fuck You. You know it when you hear it and it is dishonest. You want to say Fuck You, open your mouth and say it. Nothing lost in the translation.
Anne Laurie
@srv:
So are we all (even those of us who feel a little guilty encouraging him).
But those of us who are not built like Hodor may have to rely upon different forms of self-protection against the world’s angry idiots!
Mary G
@Ruckus: You are correct, sir. I have some relatives in the South who will say “Bless your heart, sweetie,” when they really mean “fuck off and die in a fire.”
Glocksman
When I was a kid, most of the obvious manners were drilled into me by my Mother.
You know, holding the door open for people behind you, saying ‘Sir/Mam’ to people you don’t know by name, etc.
Even today I still do so despite some of the people I call ‘Sir’ at work aren’t worthy of being addressed as such.
In their cases, If I remember to do so, I slur ‘Sir’ into ‘Cur’.
Having a pseudo Southern accent lets you get away with it if the people you call cur are from MA. :)
The locals, not so much.
DivF
The 1932 edition of Emily Post occupies a place of honor on our dining room bookshelf. I first used it as a reference to figure out exactly what my responsibilities were as the Best Man my brother’s wedding (turns out that one of them was making the travel arrangements for the honeymoon ).
Not far from it is the Dorothy Parker Viking Portable, which contains an absolutely hilarious review of the book.
Ruckus
We’re humans. We have opinions, it’s part of the process of thought. Constructive thought will find out the rational behind the opinion and adjust if necessary. Lazy thinking will just latch onto an outside opinion. But we still have them. Can’t get away from that. But an opinion doesn’t have to lead to a judgement, they are not necessarily the same thing.
Jerzy Russian
What’s wrong with an Ivy League education?
srv
@Anne Laurie:
You are Hodor’s of the mind.
@Mary G: I personally prefer “You are so precious!” when interacting with Southerners.
@Jerzy Russian: Ettiquitte Inflation.
Ruckus
@Jerzy Russian:
For some people, absolutely nothing. For others, absolutely everything. The trick is of course figuring out who falls into which category.
Anne Laurie
@Glocksman: If you can’t call someone “Sir” in a tone that lets them know it’s an insult, you’re not really an expert, are you?
Worst head case I ever worked under insisted “everyone should use first names, because it’s more democratic”. Which meant we called him by his first name, and he usually called any one of us “you”, because he couldn’t bother telling one peon from another…
Anne Laurie
@Jerzy Russian:
It’s like any other luxury good — some of the possessors will become obsessed with their ownership to the point where they’re incapable of functioning in the real world.
Think of the people who keep telling the whole world that they went to Dartmouth (Dinesh D’Souza, Ross Doubthat) or Yale (Ted Cruz) or Harvard Business School (Romney)…
If you’re really secure in your status, you don’t have to remind people about your high-prestige degree, or your Bentley, or your invitation-only Google Glass techwear. Which can lead to a certain kind of inverse snobbery, but that’s less annoying for the rest of us unwashed.
abrxas
Well, now I owe them, too. And you. Thanks for that!
Comrade Colette Collaboratrice
@Anne Laurie:
I have the sort of obscurely high-prestige degree that is high-prestige only among those in the know, which is to say, among third-generation Ivy Leaguers whose grandmothers went to Seven Sisters colleges and looked down on any mere legacy admission to Harvard. My old boss was Stanford undergrad/Harvard grad school and well aware of this dynamic. Whenever she seized the chance to be smug about her credentials in the presence of others, I would softly chime in to commiserate about the pleasures, privileges, and White Man’s Burden’s of being a graduate of an elite institution. It drove her fucking nuts, because she felt in her heart of hearts that she was BETTER THAN me, but could not articulate to herself, let alone to the credulous masses, why this should be so and why she couldn’t give me a (in her mind) well-deserved set-down for pretending to equality with Her Highness.
ETA: after channeling William F. Buckley, I feel like either having my teeth cleaned or having an enema. Or both.
Major Major Major Major (formerly J.Ty)
@Anne Laurie: Frankly I used to get straight-up embarrassed when people ask me where I went because it’s got a name for itself and would change the way people treated me. Over that now, and of course you can get an excellent education at a lot of places (including some community colleges) if you apply yourself, but I’m not sure people really understand that.
Personally I would love to be a community college prof in my old age.
Origuy
@Dog On Porch:
Did you master the “cut direct“?
Betty Cracker
@Ruckus: I don’t think it’s dishonest since, as you say, you know it when you hear it. It’s a cultural thing. It allows displeasure to be expressed without resorting to dueling pistols.
raven
@Betty Cracker: Bless your heart. . .
JPL
Joe Scarborough is such a coward. Rather than admit fault about the arrest of reporters being their fault, he showed a picture of a young Ryan Reilly with him and laughed. The good news was Ferguson was relatively calm last night, the bad news is the media will now ignore the situation that caused the unrest.
Betty Cracker
Anne Laurie, I believe MattF gets credit for alerting us to this jewel of an essay.
different-church-lady
OMG, will this blog PLEASE make up its damn mind?
Betty Cracker
Man, we are having a fierce thunderstorm here right now.
currants
@Anne Laurie: Yes, but in some circumstances one can get much further (in better company and on more equal footing) if one keeps quiet in total about such things. Although I managed to get a first class undergrad and grad education even as an older single parent, it (the education) works best often when those I’m working with don’t know that. Maybe that’s not true everywhere, but it sure is true in New England. (Then again, there are other places–also in New England–where the opposite is true. So WTH do I know?)
ETA: Or more or less what Major Major Major Major said.
currants
@different-church-lady: ummm…I don’t think it has just one of them.
Schlemizel
As a field engineer and then a consultant for 25 years I have spent significant time in 40 different companies and getting a feel for each ones personality was a key for me to success in whatever project I was there for. So when I say the borish, hostile, behavior in my current job is unlike anything I have ever seen trust me, this place in unique.
Cursing is allowed to an astonishing extent, loud, sarcastic responses happen regularly, people carry on interdepartamental feuds that were started by previous managers in different departments 30 years ago because the current combatants worked for them. It is sort of funny in a way.
But that ‘asskissing’ method has gotten me a long way to getting things done. I always am polite & patient and generally do not descend into the morass with them. I just gently push and push and push, always saying please and thank-you (even when they don’t deserve it) and pretending to understand that they are way too busy to do that (when I know they are not). It works. Manners are the lubricant that keep the gears of social interaction from binding up.
BillinGlendaleCA
@JPL:
And water is wet.
OzarkHillbilly
The other day a buddy of mine posted a drawing on facebook. On one side is a small crowd of people/ Over their heads is, “Everybody wants to be liked and appreciated.” On the other side is a single man floating up (away?) on a balloon and giving the crowd the finger. Underneath him it say’s “Except Tom, He doesn’t give a shit.”
And that is what my friends think of me.
FlipYrWhig
@Anne Laurie: Douthat is Harvard. Cruz is Princeton. Dartmouth’s crosses to bear are D’Souza, Ingraham, and the tools from Power Line. But don’t attribute Ross Fucking Douthat to us. Ew.
TS
@JPL:
And so when I tuned in (for 45 seconds) he was discussing “son of the year” – white kid buying car for Mom – followed by “your favorite cat story”
different-church-lady
@currants: There are days when I’m not sure it has any of them. ;-)
different-church-lady
@TS: Because it feels so good when you stop, right?
Randy P
@Ruckus: Actually, that’s one of my favorite memories of the Miss Manners column back when I lived in the WaPo home-delivery area and she had a regular weekly column. It was a recurring theme that you should greet rudeness with extreme politeness, such as a very quietly asked “Now why in the world would somebody ask a question like THAT?” in a slightly puzzled tone.
My other favorite memory was the couple who wanted to know if it was all right to tell wedding guests the expected cost of the gifts they were required to bring. “We understand you don’t make a profit at a wedding, but we think we should at least break even.”
Tommy
@Randy P:
That has always worked very well for me. I find when I do it people are confused. Maybe they are looking for a fight, who knows. But had expected a different response and didn’t get it.
Anne Laurie
@different-church-lady: You poor thing.
It must be terrible when one’s job requires one to spend so much time reading people one can only despise.
different-church-lady
@Anne Laurie: Yeesh… what a grouch!
Anne Laurie
@Betty Cracker: Thanks!
Tommy
@TS: I live in St. Louis and honestly nothing ever really happens here. I mean it is pretty darn boring. I find that both the police and even the local media have no idea how to be at the center of a national if not international story. I never even watch the local news cause again nothing happens and it is so “Mickey Mouse.” Been watching it the last week or so and the anchors look like deer in headlights.
Which seems strange to me, cause a story like this is how you move from a small media market to a larger one. A story you can put your name on. But heck, what do I know.
Botsplainer
I’m in my 50s. My mother (born of Central Kentucky poor white trash and raised in a poor white trash neighborhood that I’d be reluctant to let my dog stay in overnight) always despaired that I never had a fuck to give about most etiquette conventions that she earnestly believed would, along with a decent education, magically transport me into the country clubby, suit wearing, sweater vest donning levels of upper upper middle class whiteness, where I belonged.
Of course, I always hated those people.
I long held that the vast majority of trivialities of coded etiquette were simply bludgeons to wield against classes of inferiors (much like Christian Fambly Values, which is a largely overlapping bludgeon).
Besides, I’ve had a helluvalot more fun with my tacky, gross friends than I ever would have with the Stick up the Ass crowd.
evodevo
@different-church-lady: Sorry. We’re not RedState or FreeRepublic. We’re differently educated and THINK about issues. Perhaps you’d be happier there.
OzarkHillbilly
@Botsplainer: “I’d rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints, the sinners are much more fun.”
Iowa Old Lady
It turns out I’m inadvertently rude in meetings. I don’t mean to be. I didn’t even know I was until I took a new job, said something in a meeting, and had two of my colleagues burst out laughing. Apparently they knew I wasn’t malicious, just clumsy.
MomSense
If you want to guarantee rain, go camping. The forecast for four sunny, perfect days has become rain, rain, torrential rain, and more rain. I don’t think I’ve ever been on a camping trip where I haven’t had to dry out the tent after I get home.
Tommy
@Botsplainer: I was raised the exact opposite. Upper middle class to almost the 1%. I was, not any longer I might add, the country club sweater vest wearing guy you didn’t like. Honestly I didn’t like that person either.
Manners and etiquette were pounded into my head. I have to admit, especially in the business world, they have served me well. Very well.
TS
@Tommy:
Since forever – local news has been local – cats, dogs, Moms and sons (I’ve lived in a town so small the local news was via the old guys sitting outside of the only store in town) – but a national news program – on a day when a MAJOR event is having amazing outcomes – overpaid idjits.
raven
It’s situational.
Tommy
@Iowa Old Lady: I have been told the same about myself. Now that might not make sense at first since in other comments I talk about my manners. But I hate meetings. Before I started to work for myself I joke, but it is true, we had meetings to talk about having a meeting for a meeting.
Now I work for myself and have much more control if a meeting isn’t focused. If there isn’t an agenda. If there is chit chat and not work I lose it. I don’t yell, but I explain, in a nice manner, that this is a waste of our time and I am hanging up the phone.
Plus I have an amazing BS meter. If somebody is making excuses to throwing out a lot of BS, which seems to happen more times then not, well that never goes over well with me. I mean what is the phrase, don’t BS and BSer :).
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Tommy:
What you’re seeing is the ones who would never make it in the larger markets.
When I was a kid in Nashville, it was a stepping-stone market to the big leagues. Oprah Winfrey did our noon news and left Nashville to take a job in Chicago. Pat Sajak went from Nashville weather-man to LA weather-man. There were always rumors swirling about this or that news reader being offered a major market job. Sometimes they took it; sometimes they stayed because they didn’t want to move to the big city.
The drop in local news quality when we moved to Raleigh in the ’80s was one of the bigger culture shocks. I suddenly realized that staying in a smaller market wasn’t always a choice. Some of the ones here, I wonder if they can really handle this small market. FSM forbid that anything like Ferguson happen; they would be hiding under their desks.
different-church-lady
@evodevo: No, no, no, there’s gotta be a way to reconcile these two views. Something along the lines of, “You are kindly invited to engage in auto-intercourse. Please R.S.V.P.”
satby
A lesson on manners my father the homicide cop taught me was that staying calm and polite as everyone was losing their shit around you was also a power tactic that worked better than answering rudeness with more rudeness. It helped de-escalate situations and at the same time it signalled a strong presence that helped calm things down. He called it ” politing someone into the ground”. He was a smart guy.
satby
@Iowa Old Lady: And I unfortunately share the same trait. My adult son told me after one of the fundraising committee meeting that I was too mean to the soccer moms with my bluntness and impatience. He blamed it on my long employment as the only female fighting for parity in a heavily male dominated field. The indecisive dithering invthat group of women was driving me nuts. But they loved my son’s approach, so I guess I did something right.
Betty Cracker
@different-church-lady: I think you’re onto something! “You are cordially invited to dine on a non-rigid container filled with Himalayan salt-encrusted phalli…”
henqiguai
@OzarkHillbilly (#31):
You and me, Ozark, you and me…
Elizabelle
@different-church-lady:
I think your comment was funny; I know what you mean. No decamping to Red State for you, unless you’re practicing your trolling.
And: on the subject of trolling: Farhad Manjoo, NYTimes blog, Web Trolls Winning as Incivility Increases
different-church-lady
@Elizabelle:
DING DING DING DING DING DING WE HAVE A WINNER!!!
Elizabelle
@different-church-lady:
My favorite line was “one of the primary motivations of trolling is to titillate other trolls.”
Beyond true, and if you’re ticking everyone else off and driving sincere commenters away — troll trifecta!
schrodinger's cat
@Elizabelle: The best comment sections I have encountered are the ones that were self policing. I am not too fond of the Andrew Sullivan model of blogging with no comments at all.
Tone In DC
@different-church-lady:
LULz.
Cervantes
@different-church-lady: That “S. V. P.” means “please.”
Cervantes
@Jerzy Russian:
Many things.
One should think of the Ivy League as a work in progress.
different-church-lady
@Cervantes: I KNOW THAT! I wanted to leave you something to complain about!
Cervantes
@different-church-lady: I picked one of many, thanks.
Betsy
@Botsplainer: read further in Judith Martin (Miss Maners). She’s adamant that manners are no more prevalent among the rich than anyone else. If only.
She’s very convincing on this point: One of the best things about manners is that they are among the few distinguishing things in life that are absolutely free.
Also she does an super job of debunking the “fancy things make manners possible” mythology that marketers use to sell high-priced goods.
She’s also clear on how intrusive the workplace forced-friendship-and-brithday-parties model is to workers (bosses use it as a prophylactic against giving workers real benefits such as more time off, during which they can make their own damn friends)
As you can tell, my liberal, worker-loving, richie-despising self luuuuurves Miss Manners.
mclaren
Politeness usually works well.
…Until you encounter bullies who take politeness as a sign of weakness. At that point, rhetorically speaking, you have to rip their heads off and shit down their necks.
Tehanu
@Tommy:
I firmly believe that all meetings of more than 3 people are a complete, total, utter waste of time. (OK, well, maybe not all, maybe only 95% … I have occasionally learned something interesting at large group meetings, although usually in less than a quarter of the time the whole meeting took.) I thought I was going to gag when Corporate informed us that all meetings had to begin with a “safety moment” — this is in a cubicle farm, mind you — but mercifully I soon found out that saying, “If there’s an emergency, use those stairs over there” qualified and nobody was required to “share” their lengthy disquisition on their “safety passion.” Alas, many of them do anyway.
Tehanu
@Betsy:
Me too. Until I read her I had no idea that all those picky rules could actually be useful and weren’t just ways for the rich to sneer at everybody else.