Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior
Martin, Judith
firms this point. Maslow placed subjects in beautiful, average, and ugly rooms. They were then shown pictures of people, and "subjects in the average and beautiful rooms on the whole took a...
...MISS MANNERS' GUIDE TO EXCRUCIATINGLY CORRECT BEHAVIOR Judith Martin/Warner Books/S10.95, paper Alexandra SchSnburg Judith Martin's book Miss Manners" Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior is an admirable attempt to exhume the art of manners...
...On hearing this my poor aunt fell back on her petit point pillows and had to be given smelling salts...
...young girls do the same when an older man arrives...
...of paying a short v i s i t . . . [which] is now regarded as time consuming and boring and has been replaced by television," my aunt reflected on the Victorian custom that required a gentleman, when visiting a lady, to always keep his hat...
...Her discussion of jealousy--she considers it a most disgraceful human weakness--reminded my aunt of a friend of hers, who decided one day to visit his wife at the family castle...
...And the gossip is no longer about who is sleeping with whom but about money: who has made how many millions and how the millions were made...
...with great interest as I read Miss Manners to her, but she was appalled that such a detailed guide should be necessary...
...As a matter of fact, Auntie said, if someone spoke differently to a king than to a servant he was undoubtedly a fake...
...My aunt's cardinal rule is one with ~vhich Miss Manners would no doubt agree: Good manners know no social barriers...
...The husband merely bowed to her and remarked: "Think, madame, how embarrassing this would have been if someone else had come in...
...She has not left its chill walls since the end of the Second World War and is therefore safely protected from modern society...
...Her book has come in the nick of time...
...Alas, the prospects are dim: "The chains also take away political power...
...Otherwise, he would be compromising the lady...
...I quoted Miss Manners on the hideous American weakness for addressing people by their first names: "It has become commonplace to use first names promiscuously," I read, and poor Auntie had to fan herself, and have the windows opened...
...The goal of the chains "is to achieve predictable mediocrity...
...My aunt listened Alexandra Sch6nburg, whose family dates back to the llth century, practices good manners in Manhattan, Southampton, and the A lps...
...She urged me not to forget what Confucius had said: "As the laws multiply, the civilization decays...
...When I left my aunt was quite exhausted, for my visit had been taxing, although she was careful to assure me that our discussion had deeply interested her...
...Ronald McDonald, Luxenberg warns, "now speaks ten languages...
...Sad to say, at the rate we are going we certainly cannot have enough of Miss Manners...
...and blurting, rough speech to be a cure to perfect honesty...
...Finally, there is the cultural menace of enforced standardization...
...My aunt thought for a moment...
...He drank it...
...44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1985...
...it is our faults for which we are loved...
...she is the premier social observer of our time...
...In the end I went to Vienna, where I visited an old aunt of mine who still lives in our family'~ ancient, decrepit, and surely haunted palace...
...She felt better when I continued: "Such usage is not only undignified but makes a sham of the ideas of friendship and equality...
...Before dessert a finger bowl was placed in front of him...
...Good manners reveal a generosity and a refinement of spirit which very few people these days seem to possess...
...I expect that one day soon, Judith Martin will have to write such excruciatingly correct guides as: How to Tell When it is Raining, How to Eat with Your Feet, How a Lady Gets in and out of Her Bathtub...
...Alas, gentle reader (as Miss Manners would say), I searched in vain...
...We cannot hold off the barbarians forever, but maybe in the meantime we can teach them good manners...
...Who then has the power to take on the chains...
...Miss Manners writes with equal charm, wit, and perceptiveness on any number of other topics: house guests, romance, weddings, the importance of "little" dinner parties and writing letters...
...there is no difference between manners for royalty and manners for servants...
...Imagine, for instance, the indelicacies that will strike you when you go to a restaurant in New York: Men will remain seated when a woman comes to the table...
...There is no such thing as instant intimacy...
...ignorance of high culture to be an indication of spirituality...
...people speak familiarly in loud voices to the waiters and act like those rowdy types one used to see in Wild West movies (which, of course, my aunt has never seen...
...From that day on, incidentally, only mineral water was poured in the finger bowls...
...Only in Japan did I find some semblance of manners...
...It is as if, hamstrung by timidity, I~xenberg forgets what he has uncovered: The victims of the chains are legion...
...He did not give it to a footman, but would keep it at his side," she said...
...Yet Roadside Empires offers only graddalist solutions--unionization, FTC regulation, local zoning...
...They must be stopped before they proceed to the powder room, and let us pray that Miss Manners is hard at work on a sequel...
...In order not to embarrass the good man, everyone at the table did the same...
...after all, these were subjects that anybody from her world and generation understood instinctively, or at least by the time nurses, mademoiselles, frauleins, tutors, Jesuits--not to mention his mother and father and forty or so aunts and uncles--had finished with him and prepared him for the world...
...To his surprise he found room after room unlocked and no footman in sight...
...When she had regained herself, she said, "Perhaps my favorite writer, Taki, is right: 'Manners and etiquette died when the sixties generation decided that solipsism was more important than humanism...
...She told me of a day when the gamekeeper of their country estate came to lunch...
...What do they have to lose...
...When I finished the book I was so troubled that I decided to fly off to civilized climes to view for myself the condition of contemporary manners, hoping against hope that somewhere on the globe there might still be a civilized society...
...But don't you think, my dear, that first they should have tried fire hoses to beat some order into these barbarians' heads...
...Some are even inside with their feet up on the sofa...
...Surely it is time for them to unite and rise up against the burger behemoth...
...the barbarians are at our doors...
...They were then shown pictures of people, and "subjects in the average and beautiful rooms on the whole took a more optimistic view of the pictures . . . . " Luxenberg draws the evident conclusion: Businessmen who advertise in public places "should be required to protect the public's psychological health...
...But my aunt, being who she is and having the curiosity of the well-bred, was interested in all Miss Manners's charming disquisitions...
...Under the guise of protest for a better world, rudeness became de riguer, and boorishness a virtue...
...It was hip to be discourteous, trendy to act primitive, and 'in' to be coarse.' " I assured my aunt that Miss Manners agreed, and quoted her the following passage: Now...
...Imperfect table manners are considered a sign of subscribing to the principles of democracy...
...She is more than a present-day Emily Post...
...In Japan, for example, he is Donald McDonald, "a name local customers can pronounce...
...When Miss Manners reminded us of "the charm of the old custom of calling...
...Opening one last door he understood why: There was the footman inflagrante with his wife...
...This is truly a global crisis...
...I am sure," she said, "that this book has instructed very well...
Vol. 18 • August 1985 • No. 8
