Miss Manners: In room of 80, only one gets plate right

DEAR MISS MANNERS: Ever since I can remember, the salad plate and bread-and-butter plate are on the left side of the dinner plate. But at a wedding rehearsal dinner in an Italian restaurant, where there were eight tables each seating 10 people, everyone (I mean everyone) used the bread and butter plate on the right side (which I thought should have been the plate used by one’s neighbor sitting to your right).

Is this plate change something new? I used the plate on my left and confused my whole table. It has bothered me ever since it happened.

GENTLE READER: You are not the first to imagine that the Etiquette Council has nothing better to do than to annoy the public by making arbitrary and meaningless changes in minor customs.

“They’ve been turning to the left for too long, and they’re getting complacent,” one of our noble profession is presumed to have remarked. “Let’s make them switch to the right.”

Amid the giggles and shouts of “Oh, goody,” a serious member would point out that this would crowd the right side, where the glasses are put, so should the glasses be moved to the left?

But no, it would be more fun to watch people spilling their drinks into their bread, so it would be decided to make only the one switch and leave the other for later.

All right, you didn’t imagine this. You were just dumbfounded that 80 people could all get it wrong.

So is Miss Manners, although she realizes that all it takes is to have one person reach for the wrong plate, thereby forcing everyone to find that only the plate on the wrong side was available. Even 80 wrongs don’t make it right.

DEAR MISS MANNERS: I like to wear black to funerals because it suits my mood, it’s a useful social cue to clerks and waitresses not to be too chipper, and it’s a way for the assembled group at the services to express their shared sense of loss for the deceased.

The trouble is, I’m likely to out-do the close friends and family of the dearly departed, who seem to want to wear flowers and pastels, with the idea, “He would have wanted us to be happy and celebrate his life.” (Personally, I rather want my loved ones to be distraught at my funeral, but to each her own.) Is it in poor taste to dress more somberly than the family of the deceased at a funeral? Is it akin to ordering from the bottom of the menu when your host has ordered from the middle?

GENTLE READER: Unless you are talking about a mistress festooning herself with black veils and crepe in an attempt to outdo the widow, Miss Manners cannot condemn wearing mourning to a funeral. (And she is with you in the hope that her own death would not be greeted cheerfully.)

If the family chooses not to follow the accepted dress code, for whatever reason, it cannot expect others to violate it as well.