Most of us have been chastised at one time or another, by parents or meddlesome friends or whomever, for resting our elbows on the dinner table. It’s rude, they say. People with good manners don’t do that.
Okay, fine. But why?
Who says? Where did this originate? Is this a mists-of-time thing that’s just held on for years and years, an arbitrary behavior by which the upper crust can separate themselves from the unwashed, like having separate forks for salad and entree? Or is it a relatively recently invented transgression without either meaning or history, like the admonition against ending a sentence with a preposition?
Yes, I know, we are free to observe or ignore behavioral codes like this, based on our social circle. My question is not whether or not putting one’s elbows on the table is actually rude; my question is, who asserted this, and how long ago?
Sure, you washed up to your elbows, but did you wash your elbows? What is this, getting mud and grease all over that nice table cloth? And how come you’re hovering over all the food, like someone’s going to steal it from you? And what’s wrong with your posture, that you can’t keep your back straight enough to sit up?.. The elbows-on-the table just looks lazy beyond civilization…
Sure, if I had to put up with any nonsense like that, I’d lose my appetite.
Why is anything rude? I think that many rules that Ms. Manners is asked about are arbitrary at best. Someone somewhere decided it didn’t look right. Manners are supposed to make other people feel more comfortable and if you’re using them as a means to be a snob (I suppose I’m actually talking about the cousin of manners; etiquitte) then you’re showing poor manners in the act of ‘showing’ your good manners.
I feel awkward if I don’t have my arm on the table in some way. I think it comes from some long-ago crack by my step-dad that I looked like a bird when I ate. So now, I try to at least improve matters by resting my arm in front of me, parallel with the edge of the table.
When I was a kid, my grandmother (raised by her Victorian grandparents) used to make me sit on my left hand so that I couldn’t rest my arm - any of it, wrist or elbow - on the table. She also stuck a yardstick down the back of my shirt and put a belt around it and me so I’d sit up straight at the table. When I turned 10 or so, she started muttering under her breath about corsets and girdles, and my mother had to give her a smackdown. (Verbal, of course.) All this from a woman who hasn’t been seen outside of a velour track suit in the last 15 years. :rolleyes:
I’m only 33, so it’s going to take a while for the etiquette to die out. I don’t make my kids sit on their hands, but I do tell them to keep their hands in their laps when they’re not actively being used.
When anybody in my wife’s large family did anything wrong at the table (like elbows on the table), her mother, who sat at one head of the table, would simply smack whoever was sitting at her left (because that was the only one she could reach). This made all the kids come on time to dinner, because nobody wanted that seat.
Oddly enough, when I started dating my wife and sat there, her mother never hit me. I think she liked me.
Your elbows are bound to be cleaner and less germy than your hands and wrists. I mean, you don’t literally rub elbows with other people. Or hopefully not.
And with your elbows up you probably take up less room at the table, since your hands naturally are further up in the air and not in over the table surface (measurements by NASA engineers have confirmed this).
Of course if while you have your elbows up you gesture a lot while talking, you might be more likely to smack a neighbor since more of your arms are waving around.
I think the elbows-are-rude thing stems from the idea that one should display as little of one’s body as possible in a Formal Setting, especially a pointy oogly structure like the elbow. However, since with your elbows on the table you display less of your body to others, that should be more polite. Unless it’s rude to conceal the clothed chest, which is a more gracious part of the body, at least in some social settings. I think the whole thing is nuts.
According to Miss Manners (page 12, Miss Manners’ Basic Training: Eating:
Near as I can tell, the elbows-off-the-table-while eating rule does exist because it looks bad – if you have your elbow on the table while you are eating, it looks as if you are hunched over your plate "protecting it from predators’ (MIss Manners’ again).
I took a tour of the Tower of London a few years ago, and the tour guide explained that all “these guys” ( I can’t remember who exactly ) used to sit side by side at huge trestle tables to have their meals.
Now, apparantly if the guys on one side of the table all rested their elbows on the table, while all the guys on the other side, didn’t, the table was reputed to fall over, scattering food and drink in places that food and drink were not meant to go.
