This Week February 14, 1990. Page MI

= is_Manners=

By JUDITH MARTIN

hew! What a massive effort it took

to convince people of the simple

notion that courtesy requires lim-

iting the place in which smoking
is permitted - name calling, families divided,
legal threats, bodies left lying in the streets,
where the cigarette butts used to be.

Miss Manners doesn’t think she can live
through that again. Yet there is work to be
done in enforcing the rule that food and drink
ought not to be consumed indiscriminately, in
any place, no matter what else happens to be
going on. There are proper places in which to
yeat and drink - six on every city block, with

fast-food delivery trucks running past them
every minute to rescue the stranded - but
classrooms, houses of worship, public trans-
portation, sidewalks and culture centers are
not among them:

One has only to point this out to raise the
cry of deprivation.
(Chomp, chomp, chomp.)
We live in the era of the
grain bag, when suste-
nance is carried every-
where. The alternative
to the-world-as-dining-
room is pictured as star-
vation. (Chomp, chomp,
chomp.)

When was the last
time you heard anyone
talk of skipping eating

because it might spoil
the appetite? During
dinner, in reference to
saving room for dessert,
that’s when.

In the matter of the
modern smoking bans,
Miss Manners can hard-
ly claim an etiquette vic-
tory - if victory it can be
said to be at this stage,
when both sides behaved
equally badly and great
clouds of bitterness still hanging in the air.
Only when non-smokers ventured the argu-
ment that vicariously received smoke was
actually injurious to their health were they
able to enlist the law to ban smoking from
public areas.

So far, no one has been able to prove
vicarious food poisioning. So why should
anyone who feels like eating not to do so on
the spot, just because the noise, sight, gar-
bage or trash may bother others?

Voluntary self-restraint for the common
comfort, which is what etiquette depends on
(because it lacks the authority to send people
to jail), is not the rage these days. So Miss
Manners has been trying to think of selfish
reasons to offer people not to annoy others
with their eating or show them the disrespect
of divided attention.

People who eat all day long at their desks
receive no credit for extra effort when they eat
lunch at their desks. If it were not the custom
to snack while working, one could gain a
reputation as a tireless worker merely by
bringing in a sandwich at noontime.

If students and workers are able to eat and
drink while doing whatever they are really
supposed to be doing, there is no real need for
recess and the coffee break.

The unabashed display of food and drink
that people have brought for themselves
increasingly appears to others to be a buffet
table in which they can reasonably ask to
participate. It is true that there is an eti-
quette violation in sniffing around other
people’s supplies asking plaintively, “May I
have some of that?” But Miss Manners wishes
to point out that it is not quite nice, either, to
display tempting provisions when other peo-
ple don’t have their own meals in front of
them. That was the basis of the kindergarten
rule: “Don’t bring’ treats unless you have
enough to share with everyone.”

Dee

¢¢ If students

and workers are able
to eat and drink
while doing whatever
they are really
supposed to be doing,
there is no real need

for recess and the
coffee break. 99

cause it is courteous.

Constant eating destroys the household
dinner, and the household dinner is where
civilization is taught - not only table manners,
which people only think are a hilarious relic
from the past (see next point), but the ability
to pretend to be just as interested in hearing
everyone else’s adventures and thoughts as
one is in recounting one’s own.

Individualized eating, even when done in a
room full of other people, is seen as a lone
activity not requiring the use of conventional
methods that turn this rather sloppy function
into something other people can stand to,
watch.

Miss Manners has always been bewildered
that people who discover posh restaurants are
in a panic about how properly to eat in them.
It seems to her as if eating were a one-day
activity in which the surviving population
would all have had regular practice, three

times a day. But it ap-
pears that eating 11
times a day does not
prepare one for what

seems as an amazing tri- ~

al - the ability to navi-
gate one’s way through
an actual meal.

Finally, eating when
sitting down at a table,
with all the necessary
eating tools provided,
saves dry cleaning bills.

Miss Manners has
now succeeded in mak-
ing herself feel very
modern by arguing her
case with appeals to
such motives as impress-
ing headwaiters and not
having to share. But the
truth is that she believes
refraining from eating
and drinking - and
smoking - everywhere
should be done just be-

DEAR MISS MANNERS - My Significant
Other and I have been together for two years
now, and I wouldn’t say it’s out of the question
that we might get married. We are in our
mid-40s, jointly own a house, and are happy
to have more or less settled down after the
lifestyles we had as semi-attached singles.

I know her history and she knows mine. She
was engaged to a graduate student when she
was in college, spent a few years being
depressed after she found him with her
roommate, and had the usual type of affairs -
with co-workers, a married man, a neighbor -
with the usual disappointments.

She says I am different, and she is grateful
enough to be easily pleased. Of course that
makes her comfortable to live with.

The problem is that lately, especially when
we talk about getting married, she has been
trying to get me to declare that she is the love
of my life. I really do love her, but she knows
about a passionate affair I had 10 years ago
with someone who died in a freak accident.
She was not an easy woman to get along with,
but I was crazy about her. I'd have to call her
the love of my life.

Can you tell me how to answer that ques-
tion honestly without inflicting pain on a nice
lady?
GENTLE READER - Ob, happy Valentine's
Day to you, too.

Miss Manners is surprised that she has to
inform you that the answer to the question of
whether this lady is the love of your life is
“Yes.” Think about it.

Feeling incorrect? Address your etiquette
questions (in black or blue-black ink on white
writing paper) to Miss Manners, in care of this
newspaper. The quill shortage prevents Miss
Manners from answering questions other than
through this column.

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