Judith Martin Quotes

Making Others Feel Comfortable.

Your answer to when you will be available should be “You’re so kind to invite us, and we wish we could name a date, but it will have to be after we figure out how to manage seeing relatives and friends whom we feel we have neglected.

The customs of courtship vary in time, place and class. But they are always based on the desire to secure the affections of a person one believes to be too perfect to be reasonably attainable, not a person whose most conspicuous characteristic is convenience.

Eating grapes with a knife and fork is not what one would call refined. It is what one would call ludicrous.

But why bother with guests at all? The virtual community is larger and less trouble than the relatives and friends upon whom self-fundraisers had been drawing. The pioneers in using the Internet to ask strangers for money patterned themselves on the causes of reputable charity — such as donating toward education or helping the ill — except for designating themselves the sole beneficiaries. A breakthrough was achieved when it was discovered that asking for money for luxuries also brought results. These practices are no less vulgar for having become commonplace. There is no polite way to tell people to give you money or objects, and no polite way to entertain people at their expense. Begging is the last resort of the desperate, not a social form requiring others to help people live beyond their means.

Without such rules, there are no exchanges of ideas, only exchanges of set positions and insults. People who disagree rapidly move from talking over one another to shouting one another down, and from expressing their opinions on the matter at hand to expressing their opinions of the intelligence and morality of those who disagree with them.

Getting children to say ‘Please’ and ‘Thank you,’ directly and in writing, is one of the chief tasks of child-rearing. It is a simple matter, requiring about ten years of contant vigilance, but those who give up on it might as well — and generally do — concede failure on the entire enterprise of civilizing their young.

Conversation, which is supposed to be a two-way street, is treated by many people as if it were a divided highway. They may acknowledge that traffic must go in both directions, but speed independently on their own way, expecting you to do the same on your side.

Miss Manners fails to understand why philanthropists would turn from the needy to the greedy, but she is not in the business of laundering rudeness to make it seem acceptable.

Humility is easy, although Miss Manners much admires brilliant humility. The usual variety, with its claims about feeling awed and hoping to be worthy, is tiresome. But it is extremely difficult to make others acquainted with how very much one has to be humble about. No, that’s not quite what Miss Manners meant to say. What is difficult is to establish gracefully that one has cause to be proud and haughty, before one can be contrastingly humble.

It was generally believed that what people needed to get along was love and communication skills. Even business colleagues were thought to work better if they spoke their minds and really got to know one another personally, from which affection would follow — only not too much affection, because that might be illegal.

Miss Manners remembers who should be introduced to whom, but then she also remembers the difference between “who” and “whom.” The formula is simple: One introduces inferiors to their superiors. Thus, gentlemen are introduced to ladies, young people to old, unranked ones to those of exalted stature and your own relatives to everyone else.

The correct British peer would no more dream of using his own title than he would of using his own umbrella, although he carries both and is proud of their age.

There is no quick and easy way to rear a child. It takes eighteen years of constant work to get one into presentable enough shape so that a college will take him or her off your hands for the winter season, and it can easily take the child on permanently.

Anyone who could remember the heyday of the cocktail party probably doesn’t.