Ok, are we talking about just table manners or manners in general?
I’ve always thought of it this way, myself - manners are a matter of intent (to show respect), while etiquette is a proscribed set of forms and procedures intended to display manners. IMO, the former are necessary and the latter can slide.
Absolutely irae - etiquette is somewhat anachronistic (or anarchistic!!) whereas manners are infinite. Also, you don’t need to learn manners - if you respect others then manners come through, they are common sense. On the other hand, you can be the most considerate person who ever lived and still find yourself flailing over the fine points of etiquette.
Also, it is about being comfortable. Manners are designed to make life easier for everyone, etiquette about having rules that only a few know and can follow. Anyone who’s been to a meal where they’ve had to watch the hostess like a hawk to make sure everything’s done properly will bear me out when I say it’s the most uncomfortable eating situation there is!!
J.
The differences between manners and etiquette would be easier to handle if we stayed with or near dictionary definitions. “Etiquette” according to Webster’s, is “the forms required by good breeding or prescribed by authority to be observed in social or official life…”
Or Martinju, would you indirectly be implying that the concept of “good breeding” is anachronistic? That would still leave the “prescribed by authority” part. Would you also reject “authority”?
QUOTE]*Originally posted by JanusZeal *
**… Manners, like the little pinkie thing when holding a spoon, or sitting with your back straight, IMHO generally tend to be things that have no real value except to indicate that you’re well bred. There may be some overlap between the two, but IMO they are not synonymous, and that the distinction is a valid one. Assuming that, the next logical question would be: where does each individual custom fall? **
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Yes. I’m interested in which manners people see as being useful and central to being polite, and which everyone sees as affectations. A list:
Table Manners/Ettiquette
Useful (Have utility, aren’t entirely formality)
Wait until the host/hostess starts, or says everyone can start.
Put napkin in lap.
Use the right spoon for soup.
Tilt the soup dish away, spooning away from you.
Chew with mouth closed.
Do not talk with food in mouth.
Do not put food in mouth when there’s already some there.
Do not reaching over someone else’s plate.
Cut food only before each bite is taken.
Use the butter knife, not your own knife.
Pass the salt and pepper shakers, even though only one’s been asked for.
Don’t feed pets at the table.
Ask if anyone else wants the last portion of a communal dish.
Excuse yourself from the table, if everyone’s not leaving at the same time.
Pointless, except as a demonstration of social graces
Keep elbows off the table.
Use a salad fork (or even having one).
Hold out pinkie drinking tea.
Leave the teaspoon in the saucer after using.
Help a lady sit down or get up by moving her chair.
Put down knife and fork, and switch hands after cutting something.
Put butter first on the plate, before putting it on bread.
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Originally posted by partly_warmer *
**
Pointless, except as a demonstration of social graces*
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Not entirely pointless, not all of them.
If your elbows are on the table and your neighbor’s elbows are on the table, you run the risk of bumping elbows.
So your salad dressing doesn’t get on your next course, ruining the taste.
No idea.
If you keep it in the cup, you’ll poke your eye. If you put it on the tablecloth, you’ll get coffee/tea on the tablecloth.
Doesn’t help you any, but makes it easier on the lady.
It’s an American custom, done so your stronger, more coordinated hand (if you’re right handed) is the one doing the harder action, either cutting the food, or manipulating it to your mouth.
It’s a common butter jar/stick. You use the knife that’s with it to move the butter to your plate, then your own knife to move it to your bread. If you were to put it directly on your bread, the butter would get little bread pieces in it, and other people don’t want to eat your crumbs.
At a crowded table, your elbows on the table will get in the way of the person to your side.
This one is relevant when dinner is being served in courses. You are supposed to leave dirty utensils on the plate (putting them on the tablecloth unnecessarily stains it, which is disrespectful to the person to who has to clean the tablecloth). If the salad plate will be removed before the main course is served, then having (and using) a salad fork allows the server to remove the plate with the fork instead of having to fish your fork out and stick it back on the tablecloth. Also respects the chef by not mingling flavors the chef never meant to be mingled.
Anachronistic, as previously mentioned. Used to be relevant, but the advent of eating utensils has changed that.
Same rule as for the salad fork: protects the tablecloth from unnecessary stains. Yes, you may stain the tablecloth anyway, but you are obliged to try to minimize the risk. (This is also part of why you should never blow your nose in your napkin.)
Not as relevant now as it used to be when women’s formal garments seriously hampered movement. Try pulling your own chair out while wearing a corset and bustle sometime.
I do this as a matter of minimal awkwardness. If you’re ambidextrous enough to cut or eat with your left hand, more power to you. Eating clumsily is rude because it draws attention to your eating.
This avoids the risk of transferring bread crumbs to the common butter server.
Miss Manners explains the reasoning behind many of these apparently arbitrary rules (such as the complicated one regarding what you are supposed to do with your soup spoon after finishing your soup) in her columns and her books.
Deliberately emphasizing one’s manners for the sake of drawing attention to them is uncouth. Having manners themselves never is.
"Tilt the soup dish away, spooning away from you."
I’m not sure that I see the utility in that one. Is the idea that this will prevent you from slopping soup on yourself? I would say that if you are spooning that furiously, you’ve already exhibited questionable manners.
In my job, we often have dinners or lunches with clients. Since a large part of my job is appearing intelligent and refined, they actually train us on proper etiquite. Granted there is a lot of stuff to remember and much of it seems anachronistic, but in general, when you are trying to leave a good impression, you want to err on the side of too much etiquate.
“Keep elbows off the table.”
Not only do elbows on the table look sloppy, you have a better chance of knocking something over.
“Use a salad fork (or even having one).”
If you eat at a decent restaurant, expect that there will be a salad fork (Its usually the small one on the outside). You should probably know when and how to use it. If you eat at the all-you-can eat buffet at Sizzler’s or Pondarosa, one big shovel-fork is fine. Why would you advocate the soup spoon but not the salad fork?
“Hold out pinkie drinking tea.”
Not sure what this is for. I find it to be more comfortable than trying to wedge all my fingers into the teacup handle.
“Leave the teaspoon in the saucer after using.”
It’s so you don’t make a friggin mess of the tablecloth.
“Help a lady sit down or get up by moving her chair.”
Once again, if you are sitting in a both at the Pondarosa, largely irrelevant.
“Put down knife and fork, and switch hands after cutting something.”
It is to prevent you from shoveling food into your mouth like a back-hoe.
"Put butter first on the plate, before putting it on bread. "
You are going to break the bread into bite-sized pieces and then butter each piece individually before eating. You are NOT supposed to break the roll in half, butter one half right from the trey and shove it into your mouth.
"Ask if anyone else wants the last portion of a communal dish. "
Actually, if there is one piece of communal food (usually bread) left, you should order more or leave the last one. Even if someone wants the last peice, they may give it away because they feel awkward. Better to order more.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not Mr. Manners or anything. Most of the time my girlfreind has to poke me so I know to remove Buffalo Sauce from my face. I just think that when you go someplace nice to eat, you should make an effort to look like you should be eating there.
Some etiquette for the going out:
-If something is being passed at the table, do not “intercept” it. (We had a guy in college who did this constantly. We would make fun of him by having one guy pour katchup onto some fries and the guy next to him would stick his plate under the bottle and say “Let me grab some of that!”)
-People entering the subway turnstyle have right o’ way over those leaving the station.
-Do not sit there doing shots when it is your turn to drive and then say “man…I’m too wasted to drive”
-(I actually had to explain this to someone) If you move 30 minutes out of the way from where the rest of us live, you are no longer in our “designated driver” pool. You are now in the “I’ll meet you there” club.
-Do not take someone elses cab. That will get you punched.
-Try to hit the ATM BEFORE you go out. What the hell are you doing all day?
-Do not try and average your $30 steak dinner with the chicken wings and 'tato popers on the bill.
-At least offer to buy a round of drinks before the 5th round when people start tapering off
-If your friend is talking to one girl, do not sausage your way into the conversation unless invited to do so.
-Wait until you are out of visual range before you casually toss her number away.
-Do not bother everyone else if you are not having a good time. At least wait until everyone starts saying “do you want to go somewhere else?..I donno, what do you guys want to do?”
-Do not crash at a persons shore/ski house every weekend. Once and awhile is ok, but people pay money for shares and half-shares for a reason.
Another reason to keep your elbows off the table - putting your elbows on the table means that if you shift your position even a bit you’ll pull on the tablecloth.
And generally etiquette suggests keeping your moving parts reigned in as much as possible. Arms knock things over and spill things. They also bump people next to you. So keep them in close and out of the way until needed.
As others have noted, if you put the teaspoon on the cloth, it can dirty or stain the cloth. If you leave it in the cup, you run the risk of knocking the cup over and staining the cloth.
I much prefer the British custom, where you use one hand for the knife, one for the fork, and avoid The Great Switcheroo at every bite.
I just wonder who decided that it should be the knife in the right hand for a right-hander in Britain.
I’m right-handed but I find it much easier to eat with the fork in the right hand.
Also, how do you eat veg like peas and sweetcorn–what’s the accepted method of getting such from plate to mouth these days?
I’ve always used a fork for rolly-polly vegetables, in a sort of scoop/forklift fashion. I don’t know what the proper rule is on 'em, though.
“Social Grace is a waste of time”
-Red Hot Chili Peppers (“Naked in the Rain”)
However, I do find it a turn-off when people eat with their hands or something like that. But going too far with them is to me just like getting too politically correct. Don’t offend anyone but don’t cater to the extremes.
I think that one problem with codified etiquette is that its very existence can make things uncomfortable for the unititiated. Of course many things are a matter of common courtesy (a sort of Golden Rule for social interaction). However, just from reading this thread, I would be concerned that some aspects of manners that I’ve personally never heard of, and had never crossed my mind as being “rude”, might seem self-evident to someone else. If I refuse the offer of a cup of coffee at someone’s house it’s because I really don’t want one and don’t see the point in their going to the effort. Now I find that this might make some hosts think that I see myself as being somehow “above” drinking their low-class coffee.
In a way, the existence of rules makes sense: if you could guarantee that everyone was following them, then you would always know whether they were being polite towards you (or whether you were being snubbed!). If you were an awkward type in social situations, you could rest assured that as long as you followed the rules, you wouldn’t offend people you met.
However, I tend to think that a too-rigid expectation that people will follow rules that you learnt at mother’s knee (back in the good old days when mothers had knees designed for learning at), often results in the opposite effect to what’s intended. Even given the dictum that one should put people at their ease before all else, I think an awareness that there might be a code, but that one doesn’t know what it is, is enough to make people apprehensive and uncomfortable.
Finally, an awareness of what “good” manners are can have the effect Squish described. If you don’t see the point of the “man opens doors for women” rule in general, then expecting a particular man to do it nevertheless is just expecting a special dance to be done, just for you, as evidence of his “respect”. It’s like saying that the fact he was wearing the wrong shoes for the season demonstrated a lack of respect.
It seems that the certainty that etiquette is meant to engender really doesn’t work.
We live in a much more diverse society now than when many “rules of etiquette” were developed. That’s why I said in an earlier post, that one should adapt to the company one’s in: if everyone sits in the kitchen, sit in the kitchen, for example. The Queen Victoria anecdote cited above is a good example that manners rank above etiquette.
Just because someone does see the point of the “door opening” rule, they have at least heard of it and know that it’s the polite thing to do. That may or may not be true in thirty years’ time. If, in thirty years, most people don’t know that a man is expected to open a door for a woman, then it would indeed be nitpicking to expect him to do so.
You give me more credit than I deserve on this one. I did not make this rule up, it was actually being followed before even I was born. It is not arbitrary, since it comes from the idea that if you wear clothing that is designed to be worn outdoors when you are indoors it will cause you to overheat and suffer consequences when you return outdoors. It also started when there were more people wearing hats than there are today. For instance, note that it is assumed you are speaking of wearing a baseball hat, because that is the most commonly worn hat today. Would you want to wear a toboggan at the table or sitting around watching TV. Most folks grow out of wearing them for much more than mowing the grass or else as Jeff Foxworthy would say:
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You might be a redneck if: You have a very special baseball cap just for formal occassions.**
You also skipped my statement about my steak being warmer than yours and probably more tasty.
I was thinking more that while you may have heard of the rule, what if the bloke you’re with is totally ignorant of it? You thought your date a boor for not applying a standard you yourself thought was unimportant. My problem with etiquette (and, as I said, I have no problem with the concept of putting people at their ease, nor with courtesy) is that people begin to use the codes of etiquette as the things which signify someone’s attitude, rather than the meanings behind those codes. Your problem with the date, as I understood it, was not that he didn’t open the door per se (obviously you have no problem opening doors for yourself), but that door-opening, to you, signified his manners, and therefore his attitude to you.
DOes that make sense? I’m getting a bit confused myself!
Yeah, Embra, it does. Hmmn… off to ponder…
DO. NOT. CHEW. WITH. YOUR. MOUTH. OPEN.
That’s all I have to say about this.
No. But I would never believe that just because I don’t do it, nobody else should either.
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**Most folks grow out of wearing them for much more than mowing the grass or else as Jeff Foxworthy would say:
Thank you. You just provided large evidence in support of my charge of classism.
That’s a great reason why you eat your steak a particular way. Does everyone have to share your preferences with regards to steaks? Should they share your preferences?