Miss Manners: Museum guard’s comment ‘loathsome’

Fri., April 3, 2015

Judith Martin Universal Uclick

DEAR MISS MANNERS: While I was visiting a major European museum recently, a guard told me that I looked angry.

I had not made eye contact with the guard, nor did I ask for his advice. He said that my facial expression made him think I was angry.

I believe it is not the guard’s function to comment on what he perceived to be my emotional state. When he made his comment, I was not near any paintings, nor was I even talking. I think it is the guard’s job to protect the paintings, not act as my psychologist.

As it happens, I had just fallen off of a bike and was in pain, not angry. Some people think it was within the guard’s role to comment on my facial expression. I disagree.

GENTLE READER: It is not even the guard’s job to critique the art, much less the people who come to see it. If he was worried that your facial expression meant that you were in severe distress, he could have asked if everything was all right. If he thought it suggested that you had ill intentions toward the art, he should have kept an eye on you in case you produced a spray can.

Miss Manners considers it a loathsome intrusion to make assumptions about the emotional states of strangers, typically demanding that they go around smiling. Do the others whom you have consulted really believe that the way to spread happiness is to complain about passing faces?

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