Etiquette columnist Miss Manners printed a letter the other day from a woman hoping to introduce a new item of cutlery, the “cheese scissors.”
This device would be handy, the woman wrote, in cutting (rather than tearing, T-Rex-like) those embarrassing lengths of cheese that can stretch between mouth and slice when one is eating pizza, pasta or onion soup.
Isn’t it heart-warming? That anyone would propose adding a new element of formality to the genial barbarism of the American table seems to me completely charming — and touchingly optimistic.
Western societies have been steadily shedding recondite silverware — pickle forks, fish knives — for decades, and thank goodness. The finger bowl has long since evaporated, except in the most rarefied circumstances, and hardly anyone is now expected to be able to peel an orange at the table using solely a knife and fork.
Indeed, such is the prevailing informality that e-vites have largely supplanted printed invitations, kitchens have replaced dining rooms as venues for supper parties, and even the best husbands can be spotted frowning clandestinely at BlackBerries under the restaurant table.
Yes, and it’s all gone too far.
What made informality once seem attractive is its apparent distance from everything that is stuffy, uptight and pompous.
The idea was that we’d all be more relaxed and have a nicer time if socializing could be less paranoid and buttoned-up.
To some extent, that’s true. I doubt anyone really longs for the days of white gloves and engraved visiting cards — let alone for retrograde rules about who may greet whom, and under what conditions.
But not all formalities are purposeless.
The man who pulls out a chair for a woman in a long dress, for instance, or who turns like a metronome at each course to chat with the person next to him is actually making society more pleasant for all its occupants.
The gal in the dress doesn’t tripon her skirts; the metronome turn means no one is left conversationally stranded.
Yet these niceties are rapidly disappearing — and you needn’t be a cheese scissorist to notice it. You need only be that embarrassed, stranded diner.
You need only be the host whose guests start chowing down before you’re even seated.
You need only get an elbow in the face once or twice from a fellow holding his fork as if it’s a farm implement and attacking his steak as if it’s a bale of hay.
It’s not as though we’re revolutionaries who’ve done away with the forms of the past.
Here in Washington, people still strive for a measure of elegance along time-tested lines: Gatherings tend to be cocktail and dinner parties, dances and balls.
These occasions are predicated on old-fashioned social understandings that have, alas, and rather weirdly, themselves fallen into desuetude.
Thus we get the unedifying sight of, for instance, a pretty woman in an evening gown standing near the swishing traffic trying to hail a cab while her tuxedoed date is busy texting someone.
It’s as though we’re still eager to carry on the glamorous outward forms of the past but are unwilling to maintain the inner social infrastructure that makes them possible.
Children are, naturally, a separate case.
They are born barbarians, and only after years of parental exertion — “Sit up straight!” and “Elbows off the table!” and “Bring your food to your mouth, not your mouth to your food!” — are they transformed, as it were, from Ostragoths to Romans.
Too many are remaining in their naturally savage state, and are growing up to stick their elbows into the ribs of their tablemates.
The loss of various conventions, and the bad manners that this produces, is making us increasingly oafish.
The old rules of the dinner table, and elsewhere, far from being embarrassing encrustations of fuddy-duddy Victorianism, were like signposts that reminded people how to be, so that everyone could rub along nicely in an atmosphere of mutual consideration.
Bring on the cheese scissors!
