Quibbling Aside, Cleanliness Is Key

Dear Miss Manners: My husband insists that in a restaurant, a gentleman is supposed to put his napkin over his left knee only.

To me this makes no sense. What if he drops something on the other knee? Shouldn’t the napkin be totally across one’s lap?

My sons are confused.

Gentle Reader: The left knee? Where do you people come up with these things?

Can’t you and your husband find something sensible to argue about? No wonder your sons are confused.

Oops. Terribly sorry. Please forgive Miss Manners for going haywire.

Now that she has herself under control, she will admit that many etiquette rules do not make logical sense because they are purely conventional. For example, there is no compelling reason that napkins are set to the left (if they aren’t centered on the plate) other than that is the custom, which is, or ought to be, a compelling reason.

But nobody in the etiquette business ever picked a favorite knee for napkins. We’re all too busy trying to get people to use napkins at all, or to wipe their hands instead of their teeth, or to put them on their laps instead of around their necks.

Dear Miss Manners: As a pediatric neurologist, I see patients with intricate illnesses. We schedule one and one-half hours for a new visit, and 45 minutes for a return patient visit - relatively generous amounts of time being needed for the complexity of the problem.

It becomes frustrating when patients arrive quite late, often with the excuse: “You’re a doctor, we expected you to be late.”

Should I impinge on the time I have allotted for them, refuse to see that patient if I do not have enough time to do an adequate evaluation, run behind one-half hour for the remainder of the day, or “short-shift” all the patients so I can get caught up?

I can assure you that the patients are told ahead of time that they will be spending such a lengthy time for these evaluations and are well aware of the exact appointment time.

Gentle Reader: Miss Manners can give you an instant diagnosis. She has seen this syndrome before - at dinner parties.

Here’s how the contagion starts: Hosts invite their guests for dinner at 7, for example. But figuring that some guests will be late, they actually serve dinner at 9:30. The guests who were there more or less on time (and eventually ate the cocktail napkins in addition to drinking themselves silly) resolve to arrive later next time, and even the guests who arrived at 8:45 move it back to 9:15. When that happens, the hosts set their dinner back still later - and so on.

Doctors do, indeed, have a reputation for running very late, for which they always have humanitarian reasons, even when you clearly heard them on the telephone with a bookie while you sat shivering and suffering.

Therefore, some patients have started arriving later, which makes the doctors run even later, and so on.

The way to stop this, for both doctors and hosts, is to announce that you will, in fact, stick to your schedule - or at least give notice with an apology when you cannot - and that you expect them to do so as well.

For a doctor, this would mean formal notification that appointment times cannot be held for latecomers, although naturally as a humanitarian, you will try to work them in after appointment keepers have been seen.

For hosts, it is a somewhat softer, “Come for cocktails at 7, and we plan to be sitting down to dinner promptly at 7:30.”

In both cases, there will be the occasional misunderstanding, but afterwards, everybody will be better off.

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