Manners make a comeback
One might be glad to know that just as “please” and “thank you” are fading into the sunset and that the handwritten thank-you note is becoming as rare as a buffalo nickel, that manners still matter.
We might at this very moment be allowing our rude children to run amok, be stealing a parking space from someone who was waiting, or be mindlessly texting a friend during a conversation with another, but we are, at least in passing reference, mindful of the need for some degree of civility in this ill-mannered world.
Etiquette, however fuddy-duddy sounding, isn’t an antiquated notion. How do we know? Because so many people appear to want to behave better. Parents are sending their children to etiquette classes; companies are encouraging young executives to take business etiquette courses; public discourse occasionally calls for a kinder, gentler nation. And there are new titles out this season that focus on manners and etiquette (even books for wee ones, such as “Whoopi’s Big Book of Manners” by Whoopi Goldberg and “Emily’s Everyday Manners” by Peggy Post).
Within the last year, we saw the following books published: “The Everything Etiquette Book: A Modern-Day Guide to Good Manners” by Leah Ingram; “Business Class: Etiquette Essentials for Success at Work” by Jacqueline Whitmore; “Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, Freshly Updated” by Judith Martin and Gloria Kamen; “Multicultural Manners: Essential Rules of Etiquette for the 21st Century” by Norine Dresser and “Modern Manners: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Social Graces” by Thomas Farley.
Manners, it seems, matter a great deal.
“Manners need to be reinvented,” said Thomas Blaikie, author of “To the Manner Born: A Most Proper Guide to Modern Civility,” published this month. “To a lot of people, old-fashioned manners got very tangled up with the class system and became a way of excluding people from being ladies and gentlemen. That’s not the case any longer.”
Indeed, as the world has gotten smaller, more immediate (instant communication) and less conscious of social tiers, manners have become everyone’s responsibility. Blaikie said modern civility is now shared and shouldered by the masses.
“Manners is about society and community. We’ve all got to be responsible,” he said. “We have all these complaints about manners, but there’s some reluctance to do something about it. Manners is what a whole society agrees on as what is a reasonable way to behave. In the end a society gets the manners it deserves.”
Most people, despite the pressures and time constraints of modern life, actually continue to look for guidance in how to negotiate manners and etiquette, said Peggy Post, great-granddaughter-in-law of Emily Post. “The world has changed. That’s why we keep revising the books. Emily had to do the same thing – her world was always changing,” said Post, the author of the just-published “Excuse Me, But I Was Next: How To Handle the Top 100 Manners Dilemmas.” “New guidelines continue to be drawn up. We need new ways to have human behavior match up with what’s respectful of the other person.”
Post said that interest in manners took a dive in the ‘60s, but the pendulum has swung back. Today, manners books are selling because there’s an audience craving solid, practical advice for negotiating what many believe to be an increasingly mannerless world. Besides Post’s and Blaikie’s titles, this month also saw the publication of “Jane Austen’s Guide to Good Manners” by Josephine Ross and “The Mere Mortal’s Guide to Fine Dining: From Salad Forks to Sommeliers, How To Eat and Drink in Style Without Fear of Faux Pas” by Colleen Rush.
“A lot of it is the frustration level. There are so many examples of ‘What do I do if … ?’ People don’t just want answers, they want to know what to say,” Post said. “They want what I call that script for life. People don’t necessarily see themselves as being rude, but based on the letters we see, people want answers. They don’t want to commit faux pas. They want scripts for life.”
There’s a generation or two that didn’t learn these lessons at home; or their instruction was spotty, experts said.
“We don’t have the Sunday dinners, that sitting-down at the family table and talking about things,” said Stephanie Horton, an etiquette speaker, author and trainer in Seattle. “The young people don’t have a forum to learn about these types of things.”