Miss Manners

Etiquette is how you act—how you feel about it is a different department.

Contrary to popular belief, being polite does not mean allowing others to take advantage of you.

There is little you can do that will quell a modern wedding guest’s nerves. They are too accustomed to ridiculous clothing requests and registries that fund the couple’s retirement plan to be able to open a wedding invitation calmly anymore.

It is gracious and correct to start from the assumption that people are well-meaning—even if you are, of course, aware that not everyone is.

Miss Manners hears a great deal about the high cost of entertaining, and various schemes practiced in order to share the cost. The traditional way to do this was reciprocal entertaining. Hosts bore the entire cost, but then ate out—for free!—when their guests invited them back.

An event to which you have to buy a ticket is not a personal invitation and does not require you to send your regrets if you are unable to attend.

Sure, wear a diamond tiara with cut-off jeans. Miss Manners is too preoccupied with trying to restore civilized society to notice.

People will naturally differ, but agree to approach their conflicts with good will and find workable compromises.

People who feel obliged to spread the idea that they deserve more presents than would be spontaneously offered are not doing so out of a disinterested devotion to propriety.

One can no longer assume that life is any different for bridal couples after the wedding than it was before. They already live together. She may not change her name. They may already have children. And yet weddings are bigger and splashier than ever.

All one has to do these days to be invited into a fight is to step out. So it is useful to know how to decline a fight while preserving a modicum of dignity. The proper pose is a strict neutrality—neither agreeing nor provoking—simply seeking the first opportunity to disengage.

Miss Manners is among those who find little changes in language grating, not only when the usage is confusing, but when the word is over-used. Such as “amazing” and before that, “awesome.” And many more.

It bewilders Miss Manners that those who are so open to meeting strangers online that they spend hours searching, will shy away from meeting in person people who have been vetted by their real life friends.

Must Miss Manners remind you that one does not reciprocate bad manners?

You do not thank people for letters of thanks. You do thank them for presents, whatever happened to prompt them.

Oddly, it is now the young who seem to cling to the old rules about correspondence, when circumstances have dramatically changed.

Presents used to be associated only with first weddings, with the presumption that the couple was starting a first home, whereas previously married people already had stuff. You may have noticed that conditions have changed.

Failure to acknowledge presents promptly, if at all, is common nowadays—among people who consider it rude not to respond to a picture of someone’s lunch.

Poor Miss Manners, whose onerous lifework it is to try to persuade people to treat one another decently, needs a bit of harmless amusement now and then.

For a guest to take over the housekeeping without authorization from the host is intrusive and almost insulting, as it implies that it was a necessary task that the host was neglecting. Plus the guest is then neglecting her own duty of socializing.