You Used Pitchfork, Not Caduceus

Dear Miss Manners: I am a 28-year-old law student who recently found out that my girlfriend was cheating on me. The day after we broke up, she told me she and her new beau were to be married, and afterward, I learned that they had lived together.

Two days after they were married, I was diagnosed as probably having the herpes simplex virus (2), a sexually transmitted, incurable condition. I cannot yet be 100 percent positive, but I do have the classic symptoms. I have had the condition for about a year, but due to ignorance, I thought it was something that would go away.

When I got the news, my ex was on her honeymoon. So I contacted the parents of the new couple and informed them of my condition so they could warn the new husband that he could very likely be about to get a wedding present that he had not counted on.

Have I done the wrong thing by trying, via their parents, to warn them to have protected sex until I can find out for sure?

Gentle Reader: Let’s put it this way: Innocent Miss Manners, who always thinks the best of everyone, is highly suspicious. Aren’t you lawyers familiar with a quality called malice?

The excuse for jilting someone, painful though that may be, is that it prevents three people from being unhappy, makes two happy immediately, and makes the third person happier in the long run than he would have been with someone who doesn’t love him.

At the time, this sounds flimsy to that third person. But not as flimsy, Miss Manners maintains, as the excuse that for health reasons one had to humiliate a couple through their parents and in the middle of their wedding trip - to prevent the consummation of a marriage that had been consummated long before.

Dear Miss Manners: What seems to be a fast-growing practice threatens (in my humble opinion) the very core of human civility. It is the use of the phrase “I need you to…” in place of the word “please.”

I first noticed this rude manner of request at my workplace. Well, I thought, perhaps some company-run management workshop had suggested using this sad phrase as a means of clearly stating an order, as opposed to a request, to get things done. This half-hearted rationalization allowed me to shrug it off for a time.

More recently, however, I am hearing it directed at customers by salespeople! “I need you to sign here,” they say. And “I’ll need you to take that receipt over to register four.”

Miss Manners, what on earth can they be thinking?

I do not pretend to be anything close to a symbol of gentility and good taste. My background is humble, and my career with a delivery company did not keep me surrounded by high society.

But I cannot recall even one occasion when my poor parents said “I need you to pass the potatoes,” or when any of my teachers back in the Bronx “needed me” to clean the chalkboard.

They said “please” and “thank you” just as my wife and children and I still do (with good results) today.

Gentle Reader: Miss Manners is extremely grateful for that. What is more, she knows how to thank you.

You draw to her attention an interesting development (as we say in the etiquette business to designate a loathsome deterioration). She tries not to get worked up into a froth over sloppy new phrases, because it would preclude her ever getting to anything else - but the omission of the word “please” is a serious matter.

xxxx

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