Talk to the Hand. Lynne Truss

book looking a bit daft. “Wait until the credits are rolling before standing up to leave,” I see in one recent guide to polite behaviour. “Don’t text when you’re with other people,” says another. “A thank-you letter is not obligatory, although one can be sent to the Lord Steward of the Royal Household.” I experience a great impatient hohum in the face of such advice. Once you leave behind such class concerns as how to balance the peas on the back of a fork, all the important rules surely boil down to one: remember you are with other people; show some consideration. A whole book telling you to do that would be a bit repetitive. However, I do recommend Debrett’s for its incidental Gosford Park delights. There is, for example, a good, dark little story in the most recent edition about a well-bred country gentleman with suicidal intent who felt it wasn’t right to shoot himself before entering his own name in the Game Book. You have to admire such dedication to form. For anyone wishing to follow his example, by the way, he listed himself under “Various”.

      Manners never were enforceable, in any case. Indeed, for many philosophers, this is regarded as their chief value: that they are voluntary. In 1912, the jurist John Fletcher Moulton claimed in a landmark speech that the greatness of a nation resided not in its obedience to laws, but in its abiding by conventions that were not obligatory. “Obedience to the unenforceable” was the phrase that was picked up by other writers – and it leads us to the most important aspect of manners: their philosophical elusiveness. Is there a clear moral dimension to manners? Can you equate civility and virtue? My own answer would be yes, despite all the famous counter-examples of blood-stained dictators who had exquisite table manners and never used their mobile phone in a crowded train compartment to order mass executions. It seems to me that, just as the loss of punctuation signalled the vast and under-acknowledged problem of illiteracy, so the collapse of manners stands for a vast and under-acknowledged problem of social immorality. Manners are based on an ideal of empathy, of imagining the impact of one’s own actions on others. They involve doing something for the sake of other people that is not obligatory and attracts no reward. In the current climate of unrestrained solipsistic and aggressive self-interest, you can equate good manners not only with virtue but with positive heroism.

      Philosophers are, of course, divided on all this – but then most of them didn’t live in the first years of the twenty-first century. Aristotle said that, if you want to be good, it’s not a bad idea to practise (I’m paraphrasing). In the seventeenth century, Thomas Hobbes said that the rights and wrongs of picking your teeth weren’t worthy of consideration (I’m paraphrasing again). In the 1760s, Immanuel Kant said that manners could not be reckoned as virtues, because they called for “no large measure of moral determination”; on the other hand, he thought they were a means of developing virtue. In November 2004, however, the philosopher Julian Baggini wrote in The Guardian, rather compellingly, that our current alarm at the state of manners derives from our belated understanding that, in rejecting old-fashioned niceties, we have lost a great deal more than we bargained for:

      The problem is that we have failed to distinguish between pure etiquette, which is simply a matter of arbitrary social rules designed mainly to distinguish between insiders and outsiders; and what might grandly be called quotidian ethics: the morality of our small, everyday interactions with other people.

      My small, personal reason for not writing a traditional etiquette book is not very laudable, but the phrase “a rod for one’s own back” is a bit of a clue to the way I’m thinking. If my experience as Queen of the Apostrophe has taught me anything, it has impressed on me that, were I to adopt “zero tolerance” as my approach to manners, I would never again be able to yawn, belch, or scratch my bottom without someone using it as watertight proof that I know not whereof I speak. Is it worth it? Zero Tolerance Manners Woman Ignores Person Who Knows Her Shock. “She walked straight past me,” said wounded friend of 25 years, who was recovering yesterday at home. “She is also rubbish at punctuation, if you ask me. You should see her emails.”

      Plus, in all seriousness, there are many etiquette issues on which a zero tolerance position cannot be sensible. Take the everyday thorny problem of modern forms of address. I receive many letters which begin, “Dear Ms/Miss/Lynne Truss”, immediately followed by a heartfelt paragraph on the difficulty of addressing women whose marital status is unclear. Well, I sympathise with this difficulty, of course, and I am sorry to be the cause of it. I know there are many people who dislike being addressed without a title, so I appreciate that my correspondents are worthily trying to avoid being rude. However, as it happens, I loathe the whole business of titles, and prefer to do without one wherever possible, considering this a simple solution to an overelaborate problem. True, having ticked “Other” on a number of application forms, I now receive post bizarrely addressed to “Other Lynne Truss”, which is a bit unsettling for someone with a rocky sense of identity, but this is still better (in my view) than going along with this outmoded Miss/Ms/Mrs thing. My point is: there is no right and wrong in this situation. Who could possibly legislate?

      We all draw the wavy contour line between polite and rude behaviour in a different place, much as we draw our own line in language usage. That’s why we are always so eager to share our experiences of rudeness and feel betrayed if our best friends say, “Ooh, I’m not sure I agree with you there; perhaps you’ve got this out of proportion.” In Eats, Shoots & Leaves, I alluded to Kingsley Amis’s useful selfexempting system of dividing the world into “berks” and “wankers”: berks being those who say, “But language has to change, surely? Why don’t we just drop that silly old apostrophe?”, and wankers being those who say, “I would have whole-heartedly agreed with you, Ms Truss, if you had not fatally undermined your authority by committing a howler of considerable dimensions quite early in the book, on page 19. I refer, of course, to the phrase ‘bow of elfin gold’. Were you to consult The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981), you would find in letter 236 that Professor Tolkien preferred the term ‘elven’ to ‘elfin’, but was persuaded by his editors to change it. Also, it was the dwarves who worked with gold, of course; not the elves. Finally, as any student of metallurgy would instantly confirm, gold is not a suitable element from which to fashion a bow, being at once too heavy and too malleable. With all good wishes, enjoyed your book immensely, keep up the good work, your fan.”

      The idea of the Berk–Wanker system is that each of us feels safe from either imputation, because we have personally arrived at a position that is the fulcrum between the two. You may remember how the BBC always answered criticism years ago: “I think we’ve got the balance just about right.” Well, my point is: our attitude to manners is similarly self-defined and self-exonerating. Each of us has got it just about right. If there is something we are particularly good at, such as sending thank-you notes, we are likely to consider the thank-you note the greatest indicator of social virtue, and will be outraged by its breach. In an essay on press freedom in 1908, “Limericks and Counsels of Perfection”, G. K. Chesterton saw this subjective rule-making as sufficient reason in itself for not attempting to enforce manners:

      We are justified in enforcing good morals, for they belong to all mankind…[but] we are not justified in enforcing good manners, for good manners always means our manners.

      Basically, everyone else has bad manners; we have occasional bad moments. Everyone else is rude; we are sometimes a bit preoccupied.

      So, if this book is not a guide to manners, what is it? And what are those six good reasons to stay home and bolt the door? Well, my only concern in this book is to define and analyse six areas in which our dealings with strangers seem to be getting more unpleasant and inhuman, day by day. It seemed to me, as I thought about the problem of rudeness, that it might be useful to break it down. Manners have so many aspects – behavioural, psychological, political, moral – yet we react to rudeness as if it is just one thing. Understanding things sometimes helps to defuse them. Maybe I will save the world from philistinism and yobbery with my six good reasons. Failing that, however, I have the small, related hope that I may at least save myself from going nuts.

       1 Was That So Hard to Say?

      “What ever happened to thank you?” we mutter. Ask anyone about the escalation of rudeness, and