Minding Our Manners

What better way to prove your egalitarian credentials than by adopting the supposedly free and easy, utterly informal manners of those at the bottom of the social scale? The freer and easier the better, for such informality demonstrates another quality beloved of, and praised by, intellectuals: a superiority to the dictates of convention. Thus you can never be quite informal or unconventional enough.

With that observation, Dr. Theodore Dalrymple skewers the dumbing down of etiquette in this country (and his own native Britain), associating it as something akin to a liberal disease. He also goes on to point out -- quite rightly -- that exquisite manners are certainly not a function of money. In fact, I was brought up to believe that good manners were nothing more than a matter of kindness: When in doubt, do the gracious thing, and chances are that it would be the "proper" thing. Manners are, in short, a set of rules by which civilized people can live together in harmony.

With the abandonment of any formality in dress, conversation and so much more, we are all the poorer. Many instinctively feel this -- it's one reason, I believe, for the popularity of Jane Austen novels and other similar materials . . .

It's actually fun to know why certain things are done a certain way. Why, do you think, are wives always seated to their husbands' left (when they are seated together), giving rise to the aphorism "a lady on the left is no lady"? During Edwardian times, if a man was out in his carriage and the lady sitting with him was seated on his left, it was a subtle signal that he was accompanied by his mistress and that neither of them should be acknowledged by acquaintances. If the lady with him was on his right, he was out with his wife. Interesting.