Ignore Incorrect Appellation

Dear Miss Manners: Before I had children, I had a name. Since then, Mum seems to be my name outside my family from doctors, nurses and teachers, from salespersons and countless others.

I have had an ongoing battle with myself not to let it bother me. But it does! I wonder if you can help me find a gracious answer.

Gentle Reader: Strangers and acquaintances must be discouraged from the newbornduckling approach of fastening on the first warm body they happen to see and mistaking it for Mum.

You may reasonably fail to respond to this appellation. If anyone indicates more clearly that you are being addressed, you need only reply: “Oh, I’m sorry; I didn’t realize you meant me. Only my children call me that.”

Miss Manners realizes that ignoring this address goes against the maternal instinct. When any child shouts “Ma-ma!” in a grocery store, every lady within earshot turns around.

Nevertheless, mothers understand the importance of training. And since the people you mention are probably not looking for mothering but are simply trying to catch your attention, they will eventually be discouraged from using a method that does not work.

Dear Miss Manners: Should coffee after dinner always be served in demi cups? How do you fit the cream, sugar and liquor in those little cups? Should it be filled with regular or espresso only?

Can coffee at breakfast and lunch be served in teacups? If you use mugs at breakfast, which cup do you use at tea for coffee?

What is a tea caddy? If you use loose tea leaves and strain over each cup poured, how do you get the leftover leaves out of the pot? Won’t they make the last cups too strong?

Gentle Reader: Cream, sugar, coffee and liquor? It is not jamming all that into a tiny cup that worries Miss Manners so much as jamming it all at once into the body - and after a heavy meal at that.

Coffee is served after dinner in the little cup known as a demitasse to avoid keeping the guests more alert than is strictly necessary for getting them safely home. It can be any sort of black coffee, and the cup can just barely accommodate a cube of sugar and even a dash of cream. Liqueurs are generally served separately, in their own tiny glasses, or brandy in snifters.

If you want to alarm those who were quietly dozing off, you could use silver brandy burners - a sort of spoon that fits on the top of a full-sized coffee cup - to light a brandy-soaked sugar cube and then pour it into the hot coffee below. Other walloping combinations, such as Irish coffee, are more usually served in glasses or glass mugs.

But Miss Manners is getting a bit far afield. Cup sizes are more her business than recipes for igniting the guests.

In theory, coffee cups are slightly thicker and larger than teacups. However, every manufacturer has a different size and thickness for its cups, so no one knows which is which unless coffee and teacups from the same pattern are put before them - and probably not even then, unless they are paying closer attention to the china than the conversation.

So you can get away with using your cups at teatime, especially if they are not still in the dishwasher because you used mugs at breakfast.

A tea caddy is a box for storing loose tea, sometimes quite a fancy box.

As for the already brewed leaves, they are kept from going wild by adding hot water to the pot as the afternoon, and the guests, wear on.