table manners

[Dale]

If I were dining with the Queen I'd deliberately let out the biggest, loudest f*rt I could possibly muster.

Steve

Let me check the etiquette books on that one. I'll get back to you.

Heheh. I hope the book advises you to consume a trough of baked beans the day before the royal banquet!

Steve

Oh, dear me.

[SteveShaw]

Oh, dear me.

Indeed. Ahem. *slap* Grow up, Shaw!

Steve

[Cynth]

Well, I am actually quite fond of the Queen and I am going to warn her to install these special cushions on the dining room chairs----I don't know, maybe she could have them sewn in under the regular upholstery, with zippers so the filters would be convenient to replace.

click!

[djm]

GasBGon - where's the sport in that?

djm

[gonzo914]

The only etiquette book you'll ever need: "The Unexpurgated Code -- A Complete Manual of Survival and Manners" by J.P. Donleavy.

Excerpts follow (slightly smutty in parts, so proceed at your own risk):

On Table Etiquette -- “Food Throwers: Begun usually by estranged couples, once this victual flinging starts, everyone will do it...Should your dinner party have become an out of control concussion match with opponents catapulting croutons and petits pois across the mahogany, don't fight it, go with it. And when you have the desire to quell the uprising approach the original perpetrator from behind. There, slowly crown her with the contents of the fresh fruit salad bowl. But be warned. Although this immobilizes and rivits everyone's attention it also gives them new ideas.”

On Throwing a Tantrum -- "Never throw a thoroughly wasted tantrum. When this kind of energy is expended you want an audience. Although explosive outbursts are generally the prerogative of the boss of a privately owned corporation they should be tried now and again by underlings who enjoy toying with being fired. There is nothing more satisfyingly fulfilling than hearing and seeing devastation wrought from your violence. Especially at another's expense and inconvenience. But fury when intense can quickly become a peril. Be careful striking hard or explosive objects or others which may ricochet back. And always make sure the walls are paper thin before attempting to perforate them with your fists."

On farting --"The 'nert' or 'chirping f*rt,' known for its delicate bird-like tones, is a great favorite among the ladies. . . . . Those possessed of the singular ability to send messages in anal morse code should in playing any guessing game devised to suit this knack, always avoid transmitting anything, which when decoded, is offensive."

On Masturbation -- "One should guard against interruptions which the silence prevailing during the enjoyment of this habit frequently occasions. Always have ready a quip to offer the person looking for you so that he may exercise an unembarrassed discreet retreat. Avoid however, the phrase.
'I'll be right with you.'
As it leads an intruder with the intent of loitering, to reply.
"O no, that's all right, please take your time.'
Upon coming upon someone engaged in this practice, always demonstrate your broadminded urbanity with a smile and the brief comment.
'Ah, you're in good hands.'
In cases where you feel you may be of assistance ask politely.
'May I help you.'
And when you do not want someone's aid, respond.
'Thanks but no thanks, I'm nearly coming."
Or in pukka.
'How extreamly kind of you but I do believe I am already about to piquantly shiver my timbers.'
As the deposit and stain and accumulative stale stink of masturbatory deliquescences is not of the nicest, all good chaps having a pull should be mindful to provide napery to dispose of same. To leave grume upon one's host's sheets is a chink out of one's haughty particularity, unless one hints next morning at breakfast of an unrelenting night of stormily sailing across a sea of wet dreams."

On Feeling out of Place -- "If you have any finer feelings or dignity at all, this will happen everywhere. But it only means that heinous other people have got there first. Never stick around till you get used to it, or just like the boorish, you will feel thoroughly at home."

On Finding folks putting their feet on your furniture -- "Approach immediately to where their feet are and stand and stare. Should
the feet remain, announce in an extremely angered tone: 'Get your god damn feet down offen my property.' By appending en to off, making the word offen, it will make it sound as if in the heat of the moment, your accent slipped and your opponent will come to fear that another much darker person is hidden by the usually affable you.

Handy Sayings --
"So nice to meet you like this." "Like this" is the simple additive that turns an expression into something quite electrically charming and it can be equally delightful to reply: "I'm glad you said that."
In riposte to any double meaning naughty suggestion, "I beg your pardon" should be used. "I beg your pudding" is the jocular form.
In showing enthusiasm or shock, have ready rejoinders gradually waxing in crescendo. Gosh. Holy cow. Gee winikers. Land sakes alive.
And for ladies confronted by a deliberately exposed outsized engorged
gentleman's appendage from which she is not yet sure she wants to run:
"O my God."

On Doing Surreptitious damage at your hosts party -- "It goes without saying that your opponent upon whose pastel walls you leave your greasy hand prints is rich and well known for hiding his best drink and victuals while shoving at you all the old stale contents from his larder. Which ingredients should, just as they pass your lips, be exploded
back out onto the carpet for starters. Canine befoulment carried liberally on your instep and wiped off somewhere where it shouldn't be, is a really lousy ill bred dirty stinking trick. Which your host may deserve for his stinginess."

On having your picture taken with famous people -- "Get close and throw your arm around your victim's shoulder and smile. Do this at the very last second before they have a chance to jump away from you."

I'd provide better excerpts if I hadn't lost my copy, and quotes are damn hard to find on the internet. My favorite section was th one entitled "Vilenesses Various."

[Lambchop]

Good manners are not necessarily pretense and posturing. They are ways of conducting ourselves such that we do not cause others embarrassment.

Good manners are there, in large part, to enable us to live in close proximity to others.

And, you know, it's fine to announce that you don't believe in pretension and that you intend to remain as boorish as possible for the remainder of your life. If you choose to do that, you won't be hurting everyone else. You won't affect them at all.

You'll only hurt yourself. You will be the one who will end up taking lesser jobs at lower pay and being denied opportunities because others don't take you as seriously as they ought after making an opinion based on your behavior.

Your college goes to great lengths to assist its students in their goals of advancement. This often involves learning new ways of thinking and behaving in order to fit more easily with groups you might never have encountered had you remained where you came from. The person who thought to help you with your knife and fork was likely thinking that you would want to cooperate with the school's goal to help you . . . that was, after all, why you chose that college, was it not? To enable yourself to advance in life beyond your societally imposed restrictions?

To answer your question about why we do not cut food with our dinner forks . . . meals with others are not merely self-absorbed gorging sessions. We're not in isolation, but are surrounded by others. The venue provides a chance for social interaction with them. Our focus should not be on the mechanics of eating, but on interacting with others.

We don't cut food with a fork because it requires too much effort. Sawing and stabbing and scraping with a fork is a labor and attention-intense activity. Using the correct tools for the job, a knife and fork, enable us to make easy work of the chore, thus enabling us to maintain a level of pleasant social interaction. It eliminates the risk of broken plates, bent silverware, flying meat, and spilled food.

The goal is to maintain pleasant conversation with your dinner partners. To facilitate that end, we refrain from activities which detract rather than enhance it.

But, I see that you're not the least bit interested in this sort of thing, so I'll just take my Judith Martin out of the envelope and put it back on the shelf . . . you certainly would not appreciate it.

[Walden]

My background was in rural America--- the backwoods--- and in the so-called lower social classes, but when I was a teenager, as many of you know, we lived in Mindanao.

Like Cranberry, I was of a generation that was more apt to eat sitting on the couch than at a kitchen table. If we ate with a spoon, fork, and knife, and chewed with our mouth closed, among company, we thought we were doing pretty good.

Mindanao was a place that traditionally ate using just the hands, but centuries of colonialism had introduced the spoon and, to a lesser extent, the fork and knife.

I by no means think that their traditions of eating with the hands were primitive. It takes a great deal of social skill to eat rice, and noodles, and vegetables, and sausages, and such, using just the fingers, in a polite manner... much more skill than it takes Westerners to accomplish the same thing, using silverware.

Some of the best restaurants in Mindanao are hands-only establishments. No silverware at all, beyond the knives and such used by the cooks.

The rules of table etiquette, though different from our own, were still an important part of life in that society.

In Biblical times, it was the custom to eat reclining, often on couches. In Japan it is custom to eat seated on the floor, but with a table. But all societies have customs, to maintain order.

Some reasons include...

• Hygiene. This is why napkins are used, among other things.
• Public health. This is why it's not polite to lick your fingers and take food from somebody else's plate.
• Not making others uncomfortable. This is why it's not polite to stick your tongue out, with food on it, or be indiscreet with bodily noises.
• Organization. How dishes are passed, for example, increases efficiency, and keeps confusion down by doing it in an ordered manner, and not in an unexpected fashion.
• Archaic customs that are retained in formal situations. These are often dispensed with in informal settings, and may include such things as place-setting procedures.

Those thoughts, aside, I don't know much of table manners, either.

[SteveShaw]

Well, I am actually quite fond of the Queen and I am going to warn her to install these special cushions on the dining room chairs----I don't know, maybe she could have them sewn in under the regular upholstery, with zippers so the filters would be convenient to replace.

click!

14 times a day is average? I think I need a doctor...

Steve

[avanutria]

OK, so I'm going to ask the burning question that no one else has attempted..

Cran - what type of food were you cutting with your fork? Because I think that probably makes a difference in most circles.

By the way, I can attest that proper table etiquette is much more apparent in British homes than in American ones, so there is definitely a cultural aspect here - Gary, maybe that's why you're finding this thread a bit frustrating.

[Jack]

My background was in rural America--- the backwoods--- and in the so-called lower social classes, but when I was a teenager, as many of you know, we lived in Mindanao.

Like Cranberry, I was of a generation that was more apt to eat sitting on the couch than at a kitchen table. If we ate with a spoon, fork, and knife, and chewed with our mouth closed, among company, we thought we were doing pretty good.

Mindanao was a place that traditionally ate using just the hands, but centuries of colonialism had introduced the spoon and, to a lesser extent, the fork and knife.

I by no means think that their traditions of eating with the hands were primitive. It takes a great deal of social skill to eat rice, and noodles, and vegetables, and sausages, and such, using just the fingers, in a polite manner... much more skill than it takes Westerners to accomplish the same thing, using silverware.

Some of the best restaurants in Mindanao are hands-only establishments. No silverware at all, beyond the knives and such used by the cooks.

The rules of table etiquette, though different from our own, were still an important part of life in that society.

In Biblical times, it was the custom to eat reclining, often on couches. In Japan it is custom to eat seated on the floor, but with a table. But all societies have customs, to maintain order.

Some reasons include...

• Hygiene. This is why napkins are used, among other things.
• Public health. This is why it's not polite to lick your fingers and take food from somebody else's plate.
• Not making others uncomfortable. This is why it's not polite to stick your tongue out, with food on it, or be indiscreet with bodily noises.
• Organization. How dishes are passed, for example, increases efficiency, and keeps confusion down by doing it in an ordered manner, and not in an unexpected fashion.
• Archaic customs that are retained in formal situations. These are often dispensed with in informal settings, and may include such things as place-setting procedures.

Those thoughts, aside, I don't know much of table manners, either.

You win.

Cran - what type of food were you cutting with your fork? Because I think that probably makes a difference in most circles.

I can't remember.

But I think it was eggplant.

[djm]

The goal is to maintain pleasant conversation with your dinner partners. To facilitate that end, we refrain from activities which detract rather than enhance it.

That's an interesting point of view. Do you recommend people eat before they go out to dinner? That would allow one to poke at their food in company, and spend more time on the niceties and conversation than on the excellent nosh. I go out to eat in order to eat. If I spend a hundred on a meal for myself, I expect the food to be excellent, and I intend to shovel as much of it down as I can stuff in. Your stance seems to be that going out for a meal should be more of a social occasion than a dining experience.

djm

[Darwin]

Your friend is wrong...

Salad forks have a thicker tine on one side specifically so you can use the fork to cut overlarge greens rather than resorting to a knife.

It's been a long time since I've seen a real salad fork in a restaurant. Many put out dessert forks, instead, but just as many simply give you two regular forks.

One of my deeply Southern friends from a classy family once complained about the fact that Yankees often switched their forks to their right hands after cutting, and before moving the food to their mouths. So be carefu, Cranl. The last thing you want to do is to look like a Yankee--even if your state was on the Union side.

Cran, with all this advice, you now know which Chiffers you can safely go out to dinner with.

I take it no one at your chow hall has yet done the "Look, I'm a pimple" trick with mashed potatoes. That one was very popular at my college. (Of course, it was Methodist.)

[Walden]

She stood in church one day and told us this story as an example of not judging others. She said that one night she'd gone to a church dinner and, as she'd been raised, ate her vegetables with her knife. A woman sitting across from her stared and finally told her that you don't eat vegetables with a knife, but with a fork. Olive looked at her sweetly and said, "Go to hell."

Heh heh... that's pretty salty language for church... did any of the other old ladies turn pale, when whe told this?

[Cynth]

The goal is to maintain pleasant conversation with your dinner partners. To facilitate that end, we refrain from activities which detract rather than enhance it.

That's an interesting point of view. Do you recommend people eat before they go out to dinner? That would allow one to poke at their food in company, and spend more time on the niceties and conversation than on the excellent nosh. I go out to eat in order to eat. If I spend a hundred on a meal for myself, I expect the food to be excellent, and I intend to shovel as much of it down as I can stuff in. Your stance seems to be that going out for a meal should be more of a social occasion than a dining experience.

djm

djm, going out to eat with others or inviting others to dinner at your house or going to eat at someone else's house is supposed to be an occasion on which you enjoy the company you are with and the food. The idea is that good food is best enjoyed with good friends. So Lamby means that you don't want to gross people out by doing horrible things while eating---I won't go into details. You should be having a fun conversation during the meal. You shouldn't just be shoveling the food in and grunting with pleasure and disregarding your dinner partners. If you want to do that, then you should dine alone. Actually, you shouldn't shovel the food in anyway because you cannot savor it as well.

I am very unsociable and dine out with others very rarely, other than with my husband. But even with my husband, I do try to control my desire to shovel my food in (some of us are just born that way) and I do attempt to be a sociable companion. Now, if we are eating crab or lobster and are both in a busy messy heaven, we do just sit there and grunt and shovel things in.

[brewerpaul]

I'm with Tyler -- I've never been in a situation in which it's been considered impolite to cut food with a fork. I also eat with the fork in my left hand and the knife in my right -- I've heard this called "Continental style." Many Americans cut with the fork in the left and the knife in the right, then put the knife down and eat with the fork in the right.

.

Every time I watch people eating the "right" way, it flabbergasts me. Seems so un-ergonomic. I eat Continental style for the simple reason that I'm left handed and I handle the fork better that way. And if something is tender enough to cut with the fork, I do it.
Some etiquette is common courtesy, but a lot of it is really snooty, arbitrary rules made up by a rich upper class that had nothing more pressing on their minds than what spoon to use with what course of a meal..