Don’t Give Detractors Ammunition

Dear Miss Manners: Not long after my boyfriend and I started dating, his friends let him know that they did not think I would be good for him. I have since shown them to be wrong, since we are both happy together.

Now we are getting married, and I resent the idea of allowing them to be a part of our celebration, although they remain my fiance’s friends and I’m sure they will attend.

I will find their hypocrisy maddening. What is the best way for me to act toward them?

Gentle Reader: There are worse things than putting up with hypocrisy, when it takes the form of treating people as if one likes them more than one does.

Believe Miss Manners that you wouldn’t like their frank and open enmity any better - at the wedding or throughout your future social life with your husband.

It is therefore not a great idea to use the occasion of your wedding to confirm these people’s poor opinion of you. Someone with the best will in the world toward you - your bridegroom, for instance - would be shaken by seeing you snub or put down your wedding guests.

So yes, Miss Manners will disappoint you by requiring you to rise above this and be gracious, in the hope of making a fresh start - not only because it is the right thing to do - it is the only thing to do that won’t make you look like a sulky bride whose husband is to be pitied.

Dear Miss Manners: On an invitation to a dinner in the private room of a restaurant, honoring friends’ 50th wedding anniversary, it says “Please honor the request that no gifts be given.” Does this mean that we give a monetary donation? Maybe a congratulatory card? How much - maybe the cost of our meal?

Gentle Reader: Gentility is really wasted on today’s crowd, isn’t it? Here Miss Manners tells well-meaning people that it isn’t quite nice to warn guests not to bring presents. You see, the very idea of getting presents is not supposed to be entering the hosts’ minds.

Yet even when they defy Miss Manners and try to head them off, the guests don’t believe it is possible that the hosts aren’t really after something. So perhaps the warning means that they want cash instead of dry goods. Surely, they are not spending the money to entertain people with no hope of an immediate return on the investment.

Surely, they are. There are actually a few people who understand and offer genuine hospitality. They get pleasure in entertaining people, and they are willing to bear the cost. Amazing, isn’t it?

Dear Miss Manners: Subway riders are increasingly using time spent on the train to brush hair, apply makeup, and unfortunately, clip their fingernails. As unsettling as the first two activities are, they are not nearly as repulsive as having clipped nails fly past you.

I appeal to you to provide me with a suitable action that might remind the nail clipper that some personal (in reality, all) maintenance should be done at home. Any day, I am expecting one of these nail clippers to take off his or her shoes and finish the job.

Gentle Reader: As deplorable, even disgusting, as this habit is, Miss Manners has to turn you over to the underground security force. Not for the violation of etiquette it would regrettably be to go around admonishing others for their lapses, but to find out how hard it is to school the public, even in rules that are bolstered by law or custom.

Oh, all right. As she can understand that you are being pushed to the breaking point, and she doesn’t want you to turn rude by correcting others or other offensive methods, she will give you her polite technique for discouraging nail clippers. But she warns you that it takes a strong stomach.

Pick up one of the clippings and hand it to the clipper saying, politely, “Excuse me, but I believe this is yours - you seem to have lost it.”

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Judith Martin United Features Syndicate