Are Manners Important?
Put your napkin on your lap. Keep your elbows off the table. Chew with your mouth closed. Society imparts all sorts of manners for us to follow at the dinner table, and elsewhere.
Are manners important? What should be their ultimate purpose?
In the New York Times Magazine essay “A Manners Manifesto,” Tamar Adler writes:
For 4,000 years, humans have implored one another to mind their manners. I am personally invested in the crusade for two reasons. First, my brother and I were raised by a man who, as a child, was sent from the table hungry if he so much as slouched. At my own table growing up, when we small savages a) failed to put our napkins in our laps; b) ate before everyone was served; c) served ourselves first; d) opened our mouths while chewing; e) moved our forks from the left to the right hand; f) ate with our hands; g) failed to say please, thank you or excuse me; h) put our elbows on the table; i) did not ask permission to stand; or j) failed to eat soup properly, we were ordered to push back from the table and contemplate our philistinism for several monstrous minutes before we could return, rehabilitated, to try again.
Second, I have always found manners books absorbing and have read all of any age that crossed my path. Like most rules, manners are written from social heights. Many decrees for how (or how not) to do things — to use snail tongs and fish knives, finger bowls and consommé cups and other formalities of fine dining — seem built to keep interlopers out, as part of what Charles William Day, in “Hints on Etiquette and the Usages of Society” (1834), calls “the barrier which society draws around itself as a protection.” Some standards change, like passwords, as soon as they’re no longer secret.
And yet: Throughout history, there have also been good rules, important reminders of things we often forget. …
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Comprehension Questions:
1. What is the article all about?
2. What table manners were mentioned by the Tamar Adler?
3. What did Tamar Adler say about many decrees?
Discussion Questions:
1. Are manners important? What should be their ultimate purpose?
2. What role do manners play in your family?
3. Do you have good manners? Explain.