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…