Plates Work First-Half Of Dinner Shift
Dear Miss Manners: What is the purpose of chargers? Very pretty ones are displayed for sale in departments stores. Is there a rule for their use?
For many years, I thought these oversized plates were to remain on the table during the meal. Now I see hostesses remove them before the meal or after the salad course or, apparently, whenever they choose.
Gentle Reader: Oh, good, now we have china guest towels. Household items that serve no purpose except that of being dangled in front of guests who are not allowed to use them.
Miss Manners assures you that chargers, a k a service plates, do have a function in life. They work the first half of the dinner shift - not only greeting the diners, but serving as repositories for olive pits, soup plates or fish plates - before yielding their place to the dinner plates.
It is true that the dinner plates can manage without them, working the early shift and the main course as well, but service plates are decorative.
They should not presume on this, however. It’s nice to have pretty dinner partners, too, but one expects them to contribute more than their looks to the evening.
Dear Miss Manners: A teacher at my school has chosen to discuss inappropriate, disgusting topics during lunch while several teachers tried to eat. On one occasion, she talked about her illness with all the unappetizing details; on another, she discussed childbirth procedures that extinguished my appetite.
There is no other place for teachers to eat, and our lunch times, assigned by availability of supervision for students, cannot be changed. We do not have time to leave campus and go out for lunch. The table in our lunchroom is not large enough to move out of earshot. The nurse has recommended that we avoid eating in the classrooms for health reasons.
When we try to change the subject, the teacher persists in providing unwelcome details better suited to a restroom or doctor’s office. I went to her privately and asked her not to mention any bodily functions or fluids while we ate. When she did it again, she told me I was too sensitive and needed help.
How can we make her stop without appearing to be rude?
Gentle Reader: Miss Manners is not suggesting that you learn manners from your students, but anyone who did that to them would produce shouts of “Eeeew,” accompanied by simulated retching and hurried departures from the table.
The grown-up equivalent is to say, “Oh, please, not at the table.” If it is then suggested that not enjoying listening to stories about other people’s innards is a psychological failing of yours, you may shorten the remark to a gentle, “Oh, puh-lease.”
Grown-ups, and especially high school teachers, ought to be immune to the “You’re another” defense.
Dear Miss Manners: My husband has a light gray tuxedo. I have not been able to figure out on what occasions he may use it.
Gentle Reader: When dining at home alone with you with the shades drawn. Miss Manners is afraid that in public, the one deviation allowed to gentlemen for their dinner jackets is a midnight blue that (they claim) appears blacker-than-black under artificial light.