Note Is Pleasant But Unnecessary

Dear Miss Manners: I have been at odds as to whether I should send a thank you note to another lady in my office each and every time she invites me out to dinner and/or a movie. I am a young lady in my 20s and it was impressed upon me as I was growing up that it showed true appreciation and good manners to write a thank you note, and that this should be done in a timely fashion.

When this lady began inviting me with a third lady from our office, I would regularly and religiously write thank you notes to the lady doing the inviting. I have begun to slip up, but I would like to resume if that is the correct thing to do.

Oh, by the way, whether it is just the two of us or the three of us, we all pay our own way at the movies and pitch in either half or a third each of the dinner bill.

Gentle Reader: Nobody believes in thank you letters more than Miss Manners, who has to restrain herself from writing them to herself after graciously pouring her own morning coffee. But a suggestion to go out after work at your own expense, however pleasant and welcome, is not a major exertion of hospitality. It’s not even a minor one. Expressing the gratitude due to the hostess of a dinner or weekend party is such overkill for a casual suggestion that it begins to take on the appearance of irony.

Dear Miss Manners: For the past several years, our family has had this discussion (argument!) we would like resolved. When one goes to a family restaurant and eats spareribs, is it OK to lick the sauce off your fingers? Finger lickin’ tasty!

Gentle Reader: Finger lickin’ - nasty!

Miss Manners does acknowledge that it is not improper to eat spareribs with the hands at family dinners, whether the family is one’s own or the restaurateurs’. She acknowledges that a mannerly person could steady a rib with a finger which thus found its way briefly into the mouth. She acknowledges that a mannerly person could then steady a rib with a different finger which thus finds its way briefly into the mouth. And a third. And a fourth. (But not a fifth, which would be excessive.)

However, she refuses to acknowledge that a mannerly person ever licks his or her fingers at the table.

Dear Miss Manners: There are many people, particularly doctors, lawyers and business people, who write or print messages in a handwriting that is perfectly legible. But when they sign their names to a check, the signature (if it can be called that) becomes totally illegible.

What does it mean when people sign their names in all sorts of loops, lines and dips that do not communicate anything to the reader? Is it dishonesty? Flamboyant egotism? A careless disregard of the other person? Indifference? And how can a bank accept and pay a check signed in such a way?

This has always disturbed me. And it has always disturbed everyone else who has mentioned this to me. Do you have an answer?

Gentle Reader: Yes - please consider finding something more distressing about which to be disturbed.

Not that Miss Manners doesn’t fervently believe in the importance of good handwriting. Had you sent her an illegible prescription or messy letter of thanks, she would have helped you create a disturbance. Had you received a letter without being able to tell who sent it, she would have been even more disturbed, and had you received a check that the bank refused to cash, she would suspect more than egotism.

But the bank does cash those checks because the signature, such as it is, is on file, and the person’s name is printed at the top. So Miss Manners is willing to count these flourishes as a minor eccentricity to be indulged.