With all the attention being paid lately to the treatment of women, Etiquetteer wants to turn some attention to an overlooked aspect of daily life that often creates difficulties for ladies: name tags.
Now Etiquetteer has never really liked name tags. In so many ways they are an absolute nuisance, but Etiquetteer recognizes how necessary they are for many people. But they put ladies at a greater disadvantage because of how they’re worn. Gentlemen, in almost all cases, have a lapel or a shirt collar from which to affix a name tag - at least they should! And let us not speak of the inconvenient horror of adhesive name tags that curl up and fall on the floor. But ladies have fewer options. Ladies don’t always wear something with a lapel and pinning a name tag into delicate fabric becomes impractical with just one piercing. Almost all name tags come with clips nowadays, a happy development, but many ladies still don’t like clips because they wrinkle fabrics.
This leaves lanyards, which have their own challenges. Etiquetteer has heard from enough ladies to know that too many men would rather look at other parts of them than their faces. Left to their own devices, lanyards can hang anywhere from directly over the bosom to dangling below the navel, providing too much opportunity for Inappropriate Appreciation. A lady's eyes are not down there. A lady's eyes are not down there. Look up at the eyes, and keep looking there!
One solution is to knot the lanyard at the back of the neck so that it hangs much closer to the face. This could give the appearance of a bib, depending on the size of the name tag, but that’s much better than Improper Attention to one’s Person. To avoid all this, Etiquetteer would encourage ladies to wear something with a lapel, event and conference planners to avoid adhesive and pin name tags, and gentlemen to stay focused on the eyes. And don’t make Etiquetteer come after you.
