Talk to the Hand

by Lynne Truss

  All of which leaves the etiquette 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 ho-hum 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 self-exempting 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 rud
eness 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 their first example is likely to be a quite animated description of how they allowed another car to pass last Wednesday, and received no thanks or acknowledgement; not even an infinitesimal nod accompanied by a briefly extended index finger, which is (curiously) usually good enough for most of us.

  What has happened to the rituals of what Goffman called “supportive interchange”? They have gone disastrously awry, that’s what. Last year I was a passenger in another woman’s car in Denver, Colorado. Waiting at a junction, we received a wave from two young men in a car alongside. I smiled back, and then asked my companion whether the chaps might want something. She opened my window and called across, “Can I help you?” At which the driver of the other car stopped smiling and yelled, “What do you mean, can I help you? I was only being Effing friendly! Why don’t you get back to your Cherry Creek Country Club, you rich bitches!” and drove off. Of course, we were both taken aback. My companion, interestingly, was upset most by the insulting accusation of wealth. It annoyed her very much to be called a rich bitch. For my own part, however, I just kept thinking, “But surely a simple ‘No, thank you’ would have sufficed? What was wrong with ‘No, thank you’ in that situation?”

  There is a theory of manners that uses the fiscal image of balancing the books, and I consider it a good one to begin with. For every good deed there is a proportionate acknowledgement which precisely repays the giver; in this world of imaginary expenditure and income, the aim is to emerge from each transaction with no one in the red. This involves quite a lot of sophisticated mental micro-calculation and fine moral balancing, so it’s small wonder that many people now find that they simply can’t be arsed. Nowadays, you open a door for somebody and instead of saying, “Thank you”, they just think, “Oh good” and go through it. This can be very annoying if you are standing there expectantly with your pen poised and your manners ledger open at the right page. All you can enter in the credit columns is flower doodles, and these in no way salve your shock and disappointment.

  Why are people adhering less to the Ps and Qs? Where does that leave those of us who wince every day at the unspoken “thank you” or the unthought-of “sorry”? Is there a strategy for cancelling the debt? Should we abandon our expectations of reciprocity? And isn’t it confusing that our biggest experience of formal politeness comes from the recorded voices on automated switchboards – who patently don’t mean it? “We are sorry we cannot connect you at this time,” says the voice. But does it sound sorry? No, it doesn’t. It is just saying the politeness words in as many different combinations as it can think of. “Please hold. Thank you for holding. We are sorry you are having to hold. We are sorry to say please. Excuse us for saying sorry. We are sorry to say thank you. Sorry, please, thank you. Thank you, sorry, please.” An interesting rule applies here, I find: the more polite these messages, the more apoplectic and immoderate you become, as you lose twenty-five minutes from your life that could have been spent, more entertainingly, disinfecting the S-bend. “Thank you for choosing to wait for an adviser,” says the voice. “Choose?” you yell back. “I didn’t Effing choose this! Don’t tell me what I Effing chose!”

  2 Why am I the One Doing This?

  This is quite a new source of irritation, but it goes deep. As I noted in Eats, Shoots & Leaves, good punctuation is analogous to good manners. The writer who neglects spelling and punctuation is quite arrogantly dumping a lot of avoidable work onto the reader, who deserves to be treated with more respect. I remember, some years ago, working alongside a woman who would wearily scribble phone messages on a pad, and then claim afterwards not to be able to read her own handwriting. “What does that say?” she would ask, rather unreasonably, pushing the pad at me. She was quite serious: it wasn’t a joke. I would peer at the spidery scrawl, making out occasional words. “Oh, you’re a big help,” she would say, finally chucking the whole thing at me. “I’m going out for a smoke.” This was an unacceptable transfer of effort, in my opinion. I spotted this at the time, and have continued to spot it. In my opinion, there is a lot of it about.

  Just as the rise of the internet sealed the doom of grammar, so modern communications technology contributes to the end of manners. Wherever you turn for help, you find yourself on your own. Say you phone a company to ask a question and are blocked by that Effing automatic switchboard. What happens? Well, suddenly you have quite a lot of work to do. There is an unacceptable transfer of effort. In the past, you would tell an operator, “I’m calling because you’ve sent my bill to the wrong address three times”, and the operator, who (and this is significant) worked for this company, would attempt to put you through to the right person. In the age of the automated switchboard, however, we are all co-opted employees of every single company we come into contact with. “Why am I the one doing this?” we ask ourselves, twenty times a day. It is the general wail of modern life, and it can only get worse. “Why not try our self-check-in service?” they say, brightly. “Have you considered on-line banking?” “Ever fancied doing you own dental work?” “DIY funerals: the modern way.”

  People who object to automated switchboards are generally dismissed as grumpy old technophobes, of course. But to me it seems plain that modern customer relations are just rude, because switchboards manifestly don’t attempt to meet you half-way. Manners are about imagination, ultimately. They are about imagining being the other person. These systems force us to navigate ourselves into channels that are plainly for someone else’s convenience, not ours. And they then have the nerve, incidentally, to dress this up as a kind of consumer freedom. “Now you can do all this yourself!” is the message. “Take the reins. Run the show. Enjoy the shallow illusion of choice and autonomy. And by the way, don’t bother trying to by-pass this system, buddy, because it’s a hell of a lot smarter than you are.”

  This “do-it-yourself” tactic occurs so frequently, in all parts of life, that it has become unremarkable. In all our encounters with businesses and shops, we now half expect to be treated not as customers, but as system trainees who haven’t quite got the hang of it yet. “We can’t deal with your complaint today because Sharon only comes in on Tuesdays,” they say. “Right-oh,” you say. “I’ll remember that for next time.” In a large store, you will be trained in departmental demarcations, so that if you are buying a towel, you have to queue at a different counter – although there is no way you could discover this without queuing at the wrong counter first. Nothing is designed to put the customer’s requirements above those of the shop. The other day, in a chemist’s on Tottenham Court Road, the pharmacist accidentally short-changed me by £1, and then, with sincere apologies, said I would have to wait until he served his next customer (whenever that might be), because he didn’t have a password for the till. While we were discussing the likelihood of another customer ever happening along, another till was opened, a few yards away. I asked if he could get me my change from the other till, and he said, with a look of panic, “Oh no, it has to come from this one.” Now, this was not some callow, under-educated youth. This was a trained pharmacist; a chap with a brain. I suggested that he could repay the other till later – and it was as though I had explained the theory of relativity. He was actually excited by such a clever solution, which would never have occurred to him. Lateral thinking on behalf of the customer’s convenience simply wasn’t part of his job.

  3 My Bubble, My Rules

  This is the issue of “personal space”, about which we are growing increasingly touchy. One of the great principles of manners, especially in Britain, is respecting someone else’s right to be left alone, unmolested, undisturbed. The sociolin
guists P. Brown and S. C. Levinson, in their book Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage (1987), coined the useful term “negative politeness” for this. The British are known to take this principle to extremes, because it chimes with our natural reticence and social awkwardness, and we are therefore simply outraged when other people don’t distinguish sufficiently between public and private space. The advent of the mobile phone was a disaster for fans of negative politeness. We are forced to listen, open-mouthed, to other people’s intimate conversations, property transactions, business arrangements, and even criminal deals. We dream up revenges, and fantasise about pitching phones out of the window of a moving train. Meanwhile, legislation on smoking in public places has skewed our expectations of negative politeness, so that if a person now lights a cigarette in our presence anywhere, we cough and gag and mutter, and furiously fan the air in front of our faces.

  There is an episode of The Simpsons in which Bart has a contagious mosquito bite, and is encased in an isolation bubble, and when he is told off for slurping his soup, invokes the memorable constitutional right: “Hey, my bubble, my rules.” Increasingly, we are all in our own virtual bubbles when we are out in public, whether we are texting, listening to iPods, reading, or just staring dangerously at other people. Concomitantly, and even more alarmingly, our real private spaces (our homes; even our brains) have become encased in a larger bubble that we can’t escape: a communications network which respects no boundaries. Our computers are fair game for other computers to communicate with at all times. Meanwhile, people call us at home to sell us things, whatever the time of day. I had a call recently from a London department store at 8pm to arrange a delivery, and when I objected to the hour, the reply was, “Well, we’re here until nine.” There is no escape. In a Miami hotel room last year, I retrieved the message flashing on my phone, and found that it was from a cold caller. I was incensed. Someone in reception was trying to sell me a time share. In my hotel room! No wonder people are becoming so self-important, solipsistic, and rude. It used to be just CIA agents with ear-pieces who walked round with preoccupied, faraway expressions, and consequently regarded all the little people as irrelevant scum. Now, understandably, it’s nearly everybody.