If you feel humiliated, it is because you are being very closed minded. If your husband really wanted to humiliate you, he could just pick up the whole steak/chicken/whatever with his fork and proceed to rip off pieces with his teeth. No, manners are arbitrary. Some indian food you are supposed to scoop up with your fingers. It used to be that french ettiquitte dictated that sandwiches were eaten with knife and fork, etc. I say that you should approach this with an open mind: Go out to a steakhouse with your husband and try it his way! If people point at you and whisper behind their hands, then you are right. If not, then you should consider that perhaps people don’t care that much and that it’s all in you head.
Excellent suggestions, all! (Including the “lighten up, Poddy!” variety. ) If it comes up again, I will try the too-much-concentration ploy, the leftover gambit (I suspect “But I’ll eat it all!” will be his response, too, but it might help establish the wisdom of the general rule), and the cooling angle.
Apparently at some point in the dim past, I tried the respect-for-the-chef thing, because in the most recent round, he insisted that since he cooked the steak at the dinner in question, he doesn’t have to show respect for himself, so he’s free to cut away.
And in general, I think maybe I need more smilies in my posts. I’m not actually humiliated by it. I love the hubby including all his faults, both the real ones, and the imaginary ones that I blow all out of proportion :), and if he continues cutting his meat up at the beginning of the meal I will not leave him to run off with another man (even if the other man has better table manners.)
I used to make the efficiency point. Unfortunately, manners are not about efficient. It is about making a small ritual of politeness out of the smaller details of life, even if it takes a few seconds more to pass through a door if you hold it for the burden-bearing person following.
The reason I learned to do this properly was simple. Only people with very good manners get promoted, or can hold their own, especially if doing business overseas. Good manners are expected at a high-class restaurant, and your clients will notice if you do not measure up properly.
Your husband might say, then I shall do it properly only when dining out when I entertain clients. The trouble is, one forgets and uses the more habitual and “wrong” way if not practicing it all the time.
Besides, doesn’t he want to impress you with his manners even moreso than a business peer or client?
I highly value what proper manners I’ve been able to learn. My upbringing was not in such an environment as to learn them as a young person, so I have had to grow and progress. I take some small amount of pride in my progress.
Although I still have a touch of difficulty gracefully accepting a man’s help with my coat, I do very much like being on the receiving end of a man’s excellent manners. It is only proper, then, that I should cultivate and develop my own decorum to try and give as good as I get.
It may not be the meat slicing standard but why is this bad table manners? The answers given to date to classify this as a breach of etiquette are just plain silly.
1: It looks weird - Not to most people. Normal people have all kinds of little dining quirks. Parceling out your meat is so far down on the list of valid things to be annoyed at it’s not even worth considering.
2: It’s dis-respects the Chef - On puh-leeze!
3: It’s all “kiddy like” - Not really. I known several grown men with impeccable social manners that do this.
4: It’s too assembly line and “fast” - Another puh-leeze.
4: You ignore the other guests - Nonsense, although not one myself, most of the “cutters” I have dined with are perfectly capable of carrying on a conversation and cutting bite size chunks of meat at the same time.
5: It just bugs me - I think this is the nub of it. If irrational things bug you that’s really more your problem than his, and you have little to no justification for being judgmental about this issue. You are simply not right about it being bad etiquette, so you need to get off your high horse with him on that issue. This is simply a marital power struggle not an real world etiquette issue.
Man, the responses to this OP are depressing me. I’m upping the brainwashing on my kids starting tonight. The future of civilization hangs in the balance.
Pod, I’m really glad you’re looking at this with a light heart, because I was really getting steamed reading your post. Seemed to me you really should have more important things to think about. What would be next? Making sure he zippers first before he closes the button on his pants?
And this:
Holy explative! If my wife ever did that to be she’d be sleeping in the garage that night!
And if I let every little thing she did that bugged me really get to me, I’d be in a rubber room by now.
As for the OP, I have never even considered a topic like this. I suppose I usually cut up my meat either all at once or mostly in the beginning. I do so quickly and at the beginning of dinner solely so I can spend the majority of my attention on the others I’m eating with for the rest of dinner without having to continually look away from them to saw at some meat.
And cher3, what was the point of that? Who were you poking fun at?
It annoys me as well. After I or the chef have gone through all the trouble of searing and grilling the steak perfectly. to lock all the beautiful meat juices in a succelent piece of steak, somebody cuts it into little pieces way before they are ready to eat that section. It creates way to much unproctected surface area and you can just see the little pieces drying out as every bit of juice leaks out from every exposed side. You might say it’s a well-done piece of steak with no juices anyway, but anybody who eats well-done steak is not fit to eat with civilized man anyway, so it’s moot anyway.
Pod, I’m really glad you’re looking at this with a light heart, because I was really getting steamed reading your post. Seemed to me you really should have more important things to think about. What would be next? Making sure he zippers first before he closes the button on his pants?
And this:
Holy explative! If my wife ever did that to be she’d be sleeping in the garage that night!
And if I let every little thing she did that bugged me really get to me, I’d be in a rubber room by now.
As for the OP, I have never even considered a topic like this. I suppose I usually cut up my meat either all at once or mostly in the beginning. I do so quickly and at the beginning of dinner solely so I can spend the majority of my attention on the others I’m eating with for the rest of dinner without having to continually look away from them to saw at some meat.
And cher3, what was the point of that? Who were you poking fun at?
Pod While it’s true that some manners seem silly and outdated, one of the best arguments I have ever heard for them is that “good manners is a display of respect for your companion(s).” A lot of them do exist as pointless social conventions, but part of the whole point of “social conventions” is for the part they play in socializing.
You don’t adhere to good manners so that you look “cultured”, you adhere to the silly conventions as display of respect.
< /Removing Ms. Manners hat >
“What do I care what they think?” That is simply an unacceptable response.
My ex-boyfriend shocked me one day when we were in a restaurant and I had to use the ladies room. He stood when I left the table, and he stood again when I returned to the table and then took his seat again. That impressed me greatly. Standing when a lady arrives at the table is a point of ettiquette that is utterly useless to the task of comsuming a meal, it is also so outdated in a world where people wear baseball caps at the dinner table. But it was such an incredible display of courtesy and respect, that to this day I am still very impressed with the lad.
But our willingness to violate those silly manner rules is what eventually gets them disregarded in society. I couldn’t care less if a man wore a baseball cap while he ate. I don’t expect men to stand when I walk into a room or get up from/leave a table. It’s silly. It has no purpose. And it certainly doesn’t show respect. Mindlessly following illogical social rules for no reason other than “it’s what you’re supposed to do” doesn’t mean you respect people. A person could be a wife-beater who abuses his children and lies to everyone he meets, but he could still have the best table manners in the world.
Note: I’m not picking on Charmian’s post per se. She just happened to be in my line of sight.
As one who prefers their meat just past the FDA approved definition of Rare I think you’ve just come up with a second very good reason that’s not based on etiquette!
Rapid cooling, and loss of precious juices.
Manner’s or no, I think those make for very good reasons to limit how many pieces one cuts off before eating them.
It was what seemed to me to be at the bottom of all the supposedly “logical” reasons for ignoring basic table manners.
However, I wholeheartedly agree that your wife should be in deep doo doo if she were to correct your manners, particularly in public or in such an offensive way.
Unfortunately for Podkayne, correcting the manners of a grown-up trumps cutting up your food in bitty bites for crassness.
That’s why I plan to start early–and DeadlyAccurate’s post really underscores how important that is.
Standing when someone enters a room does have a purpose and that purpose is, in fact, to show respect. It’s not a practical matter, like giving your seat to a pregnant woman. It’s a sign, a symbol. Yes, it is arbitrary, just like the attachment of certain definitions to certain patterns of sounds. But it is understood as a sign of respect, and not doing it is understood as either ignorance or a lack of concern with showing respect for others.
Just FYI, I would never correct him in front of anyone. . . sheesh . . . That would be a rudeness to top all rudenesses!
And I find it amusing that people think I’m trying to get him to quit because it bugs me . . . Like I said, if we’re eating alone at home, who cares? (Maybe that’s part of my problem? Failure to nip in the bud! ) I don’t expect perfect table manners with just the two of us–just a little basic courtesy, like not chewing with our mouths open, and covering our mouths when we belch, and not reading at the table. But while having a nice, sit-down dinner with other people (e.g. my MIL’s friend, in the OP), I’d prefer that we mind our p’s and q’s. I don’t think this is a subtle enough behaviour that we need to practice it all the time (unlike elbows on the table, my own personal bad habit :o ).
And I’m frankly suprised at the number of people who don’t know about this rule. If, as astro says, it’s not bad etiquette, I’d like to see it from an authoritative source. Browsing three pages of Google results for “etiquette cutting meat bite”, I find many websites that dictate cutting no more than a few bites at one time (e.g. from a restaurant guide, etiquette-network.com, ["Soyouwanna Improve Your Table Manners](So You Wanna – Learn to do just about anything… tablemannersFULL.html), an etiquette guide for Florida State University athelets ) and can’t find a single source that says it’s okay to cut your meat up all at once.
Scarlette, I’ve only been to one dinner that was fancy enough to have bread plates, and I did indeed butter and eat the rolls one piece at a time. I can’t claim that I knew the definitive etiquette–I’d just read it in a book somewhere, and I was petrified that I’d screw up, so I was following the hostess slavishly.
Those of you who know my views on religion will understand the vehemence of the following statement: “manners” are even more arbitrary, silly, pointless, and downright wrong than even a typical religion.
Standing when someone enters the room is only a sign of respect if the stander acts out of respect. If someone stands because they are “supposed to”, but not because they truly respect the person entering, then there really wasn’t any point in standing at all. Especially since the person entering the room has no way of knowing if the standing was out of respect or out of deference to custom.
IMHO, “manners” aren’t classy. They’re classist. They exist so those who follow them can look down on those who don’t.
If someone wants to eat soup with a tea spoon instead of a soup spoon, I couldn’t care less. If they want to eat everything with a special utensil (salad fork for the salad, etc.) then they can do that as well. The problem, for me, comes when someone says that their preference is a rule.
(Nobody’s ever accused me of not being opinionated enough. :D)
Nope. I can hardly think of anything less classist than good manners. They cost nothing. I may not be able to provide my children with all the worldly goods that some others can, or open as many doors for them (so to speak), but teaching them good manners is absolutely free. Rules of etiquette exist to make things like eating dinner a pleasant experience for everyone, and the vast majority of them are really very simple and user-friendly. Soup spoons weren’t created to trip up the unwary so that everyone else can snigger behind their (linen) napkins. They were created because they are better for eating soup with than a teaspoon. Basic good table manners are really quite reasonable. To take the example at hand–it’s perfectly okay to cut off a few bites of your meat at a time. It’s only butchering the whole thing methodically before taking a bite that is seen as distracting and ungainly.
And looking down on people for ignorance is the height of bad manners. If you only provided me with a teaspoon to eat my soup, I would use it as gracefully as I could manage, without a peep of protest.
Standing when someone enters a room is a smooth and efficient way of respectfully acknowledging their presence without breaking up the conversation too much. It’s not supposed to be a grand gesture of deep and abiding admiration–just a simple way of letting someone know that they are being welcomed into the group.
I’m an atheist, too, and I don’t see the rules of religion or etiquette as arbitrary. Both were invented by people as ways of trying to live life as well as possible and they shoul be evaluated as such. I’m all for fighting the good fight when it comes to important things like sexual orientation, but, please, let’s chew with our mouths shut.
) If it comes up again, I will try the too-much-concentration ploy, the leftover gambit (I suspect “But I’ll eat it all!” will be his response, too, but it might help establish the wisdom of the general rule), and the cooling angle.