Etiquette Laws Protect All Of Us.

When people claim that of course “nobody really cares about etiquette nowadays,” Miss Manners starts waving the etiquette crime news at them.

Then it is a good thing for them that she does care about etiquette. Otherwise, she might wave it uncomfortably close to their faces, provoked to near-violence by their choice of the pronoun “nobody” to refer to herself.

An etiquette crime, in this context, is not a crime committed against etiquette (such as sticking out the tongue and saying, “Nyah-nyah”). It is a crime committed in the name of etiquette (such as shooting the person behind the rude tongue).

Etiquette is not supposed to be dealing with violence at all, let alone serving as an excuse to commit it. Its job is to head off potential violence at the small-annoyance stage.

This is why it is always pleading with people not to do things that drive other people berserk and to apologize after they do.

But it has been some time since this has been a mere figure of speech. Tragically, there are accounts in the news every day of parents and baby sitters battering and killing children for the trivial etiquette lapses to be expected of all children, such as whining, wheedling and crying.

Highway discourtesy and the perception of being treated disrespectfully are also now commonplace motives for crime. Whether they realize it or not, aggressive drivers and touchy teen-agers care so much about etiquette that they kill to maintain it.

This is not the approved method for keeping society polite. Miss Manners cites it only to show that the craving to be treated politely is so fundamental that even outlaws feel it.

But those with more reasonable tempers shrug off these examples as senseless crimes, or they insist that the true reasons for these crimes, which must be deeply psychological or sociological (and therefore, unlike the discipline of etiquette,) haven’t been stated.

But Miss Manners knew she finally had them when she spotted a 2-inch Associated Press item datelined Key West, Fla.:

“A busboy at a resort shot and killed the head dishwasher on Sunday after the two argued over how to put silverware into the dishwasher, the police said.” The suspect argued “about which container silver should be put to be washed,” left the premises, and then returned to settle the issue with a 9-millimeter pistol.

Gentle Reader: You law-abiding and gentle citizen who would never hurt a fly; you good-natured soul who gives everyone the benefit of the doubt; you who are a safe driver, a peacemaker, a lover of humanity; you who claim you don’t care about etiquette and always give as the example that you couldn’t care less about the proper way to place forks - Gentle Reader, can you honestly claim that you have no opinion about the proper way to place forks in a dishwasher (tines up or down) or how nearly clean things must be before they are put in the dishwasher, or which tableware should never go in the dishwasher?

Amazingly, this question is too trivial a one for etiquette to bother making a ruling on. Put them in any old which way you like. Miss Manners doesn’t care.

But you have the notion that there is a right way and a wrong way, just as if it were a rule of etiquette, and you feel passionately about it.

The law is what protects the two of you from killing each other. Etiquette is what requires you to refrain from everything else you can think of to make that person’s life miserable. So please don’t tell Miss Manners that you and yours don’t need its protection.

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