And the Costa Concordia. I read somewhere that the captain hightailed it off the ship and was speaking to someone (company personnel maybe?) and the person told him in no uncertain terms to get his ass back onto that sinking ship.
See also, the Costa Concordia grounding. The captain was the first guy off the boat, and is universally condemned as a coward because of it.
Still, I’ve always wondered about the whole “women & children first” idea. Didn’t this originate in the days before welfare, or any other social safety nets? Back then, the loss of the primary wage earner (ie, the father) pretty much guaranteed that the familiy would be left destitute. The sinking of the Titanic devistated entire communities in England for exactly this reason.
So where is this followed? This thread is about etiquette that has continued despite no longer being required, not stuff written in old books that is now ignored.
I think it’s just because you take up more space at the table if you put your elbows on it. And in traditional settings, the table is crowded and it would be very rude to lay claim to that space when you aren’t actively using it (say, by cutting your meat.) Modern chairs are much much wider than traditional chairs, so perhaps that one has become less relevant. But I still eat at some tables that are cosy, and where planting your elbows would be obviously rude.
“Clean your plate as people in xxxxx are starving.”
(of course, people in XXX are still starving, but it makes no sense for Americans to be"Clean plate rangers" when “too much food” is a bigger problem in America)
“Oh, you cook for them too?”
“Got a stamp?”
That will vary by location and by family. In Spain it is common to pick up your coworker’s phones and take the message (for a lot of European countries, letting it go to the beepy recording only became possible about 15 years ago and most people have no idea how to deal with it); with family, even more so. And apparently my voice and my mother’s are identical: her best friend is one of the few people who can tell us apart on the phone but it’s because I say “hello, good morning” and Mom says “yeah?”
The convention in our own society that brides wear white developed from the much older convention that candidates for baptism, first eucharist and confirmation wore white. The colour was intended to suggest new life, purity and virtue and of course most of the people wearing in that context were infants or children.
The colour was adopted for brides in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and was seen as evoking the same concepts - youth, purity, freshness.
Nowadays, of course, we regard marriage at a young age as foolhardy, and we are more inclined to identify qualities such as maturity and a degree of economic stability as desirable attainments before marriage. But by convention brides continue to dress like little girls making their first communion.
You have no idea how freaking thrilled I am that my parents skipped that whole line of crap. And the forcing to eat stuff we disliked.
In general, we had meals that were regular food, whatever our parents were having. Generally it was the normal stuff we had been eating all along. If there was something different, we were given one or two bites of the food and had to try it. If we liked it we could have more, but after than if it was served we could politely decline it and double up on something else. My brother and I grew up liking stuff like german style wilted spinach salads [Mom hated canned spinach and refused to use the green slime, as she called it, so we only had spinach in season from our garden] brussels sprouts which she found locally in season, lima beans [we grew them - she made this baby lima bean soup that was amazing] artichokes my dad brought back from California when he had to go to a base out there for some school or another back in 1968. I think we must have been the only kids in our tiny town in western NY to have had fresh whole globe artichokes at the time.
The only food dissent we had in our house was a ham loaf [take a picnic ham, grind like ground beef, mix with bread crumbs, egg and whatnot, and bake like a meatloaf. Yes it was as disgusting as it sounds.] Neither my brother nor I would eat more than a single bite of it. There was one other time we had problems but not actual dissent, my mother was in hospital with pneumonia, Marie had the evening off and my father decided to make stewed tomatoes - he used either salt or sugar, and mom normally used the other so we decided it was disgusting. Normally we liked stewed tomatoes … oops :smack:
When the idea first arose on the Birkenhead, it was applied to a group of very young soldiers - much was made of the fact that they were new recruits. So it was most unlikely that they were heads of families.
From a contemporary account:
The Kipling poem:
Later, the same standards were of course applied to men more generally.
Even well into the 20th Century, you can find plently of pictures of newlyweds where the bride isn’t wearing a bridal gown. The bride & groom would simply show up at church in their “Sunday best.”
That may be one of several origins, but due to the numerous other reasons parents tell thier kids to finish everything on their plates we can’t say the practice in inapplicable or obsolete today. I came up with the idea of trying to get my kids to finish everything (at least at supper) on my own for several reasons. We don’t give them excessive amounts of food; they’re capable of eating it all (we’ve seen them). In fact, we usually give them slightly less than they tyically eat so that when they finish they can have more of whatever they want. But…
They easily get distracted and often don’t feel like eating at the particular time supper is, but they’re too little to prep a meal for themselves and if they don’t eat a reasonable amount (see above) at suppertime they’ll be grouchy and hungry a couple hours later when it’s bed time. Answer: “eat all your food now”. Given the choice they’d randomly fill up on sugar and snacks at their own whim and have a pretty shitty and inconsistent diet. However, it’s not practical follow each one around and record every cookie, penut, and cheese string they eat through the day so as to formulate what’s missing and design suppertime around them. I want them to get at least a bit of healthy food in their systems every day and not to pick through their plate and just eat the bacon bits from their salad. Eating everthing on thier plate ensures they get a minimal amount of what they should get. I care less if they finish all their treats or random snack items earlier in the day.
Also, being kids they tend to be a bit gross and stick their dirty fingers in their food or leave excessive amounts of drool on thier utensils which gets smeared back into the food on their plates. Sure, it’s the “Ick factor”, but I’m not putting what they don’t eat back into the main pot; so if they don’t eat it all it’s in the garbage; I don’t like throwing away otherwise good food/money. Sometimes kids will try to play power games or challenge a parents authority around eating; they’ll eat a certain dish 10 times (liking it) and then one day claim they hate it. Or they’ll feel like doing thier own thing and fake being sick at the table. Finishing their food anyway is a way to keep them in line (and at the same time adequately fed). IME a grouchy kid who’s allowed to skip eating a normal amount of supper only gets grouchier later in the evening and even more prone to being disobediant (having gotten out of finishing through arguing).
The above aren’t meant as points to argue on parenting, but just as several examples to show that finishing everything on your plate is not always rooted in the great depression and perhaps shouldn’t be on this list. In fact, most of my reasons revolve around times of plenty and having access to excess resources. The reasons for this practice are simply too variable.
This is the part I don’t get. Again, those were times when society as a whole would respond to your noble sacrifice by shrugging indifferently as your widow whored herself out in some back alley so your kids wouldn’t go hungry that night. And any man called upon to make such a sacrifice would certainly know this. It seems to me that the typical response from the typical man would be something equating to “fuck you.”
Or maybe that was the typical response, and the idea that this attitude was ever widely followed is largely mythical.
Indeed, a white wedding dress also had the effect of announcing the bride’s family was rich enough to buy her a widely impractical dress that was impossible to clean properly & would be ruined by the smallest amount of dirt. Most brides just bought a dress that would become their new Sunday best, or barring that just wore the nicest dress they already had. Granted starting with the availability of artificial dyes in the late 19th century it became possible for a lot of women to buy a white dress & dye it after their wedding.
Also it’s “something blue” that signifies virginity, blue being long associated with the Virgin Mary in artwork.
Possibly not. The “blue” was often a garter, and the custom originated in England. The “something borrowed” was best a undergarment from a wife with many kids.
And of course, the “a silver sixpence in her shoe” is a nice little piece of cash in those days, like keeping a $20 in your bra. I buy these when I see them and give them as little gifts to brides to be.
Queen Victoria likely started the White Wedding custom in 1840.
I have read that this was the case in a couple of places.
Q: Why does the bride wear white?
A: The dishwasher should match the other appliances…
To be fair, what I read of the Korean disaster was that the captain and crew left because there was nothing they could do. The cabins entrances (?) were inaccessibly underwater and the PA system had failed, so they could not change the orders to “remain in your cabin”. But true, the optics don’t look good.
The “women and children first” mentality is the extension of the notion of Chivalry; the European notion that the powerful prove their place by being generous and gracious, following the Christian precepts of charity or love - “I could fight my way to the front of the line / kill you /take your food , we both know this, so I will let the weaker ones go ahead of me /live /eat to prove my strength.”
As a counterpoint to this, watch a movie like the Canadian “Black Robe” (if you can find it). It loosely follows the example of the Jesuit martyrs among the Hurons and Algonquin in the 1600’s. The native chief explains the difference - “if I let my enemy live when I could kill him, I show weakness. If my enemy thinks I am weak, he will come back and try even harder to kill me.” Different cultures, different perspectives on how to treat others. We might see that as cruel and barbaric, but to that culture their actions are logical and necessary.
Nope. Billy Idol, 1982. 
Please don’t perpetuate that urban legend! Not only do we know where the military salute really originated, but even if we didn’t, there still would be no plausible reason why to believe that it originated with medieval knights. Consider: the knights disappeared in the late 1400s; saluting wasn’t adopted until the 1700s. What kind of tradition gets into a 200-300 year hiatus and then suddenly becomes universal again?
The very article you linked explains real origin of saluting in the very next paragraph: