Dear Etiquetteer:
Where do you stand on the 'clinking' of glasses after a toast? I don't recall the etiquette rules on this but it does 'feel' rather awkward sometimes.
P.S. The next person who says "let's cheers..." instead of "let's toast..." is going to be invited to attend an etiquette class, in very strong but polite language.
Dear Toasted:
Just as it's not Perfectly Proper to applaud the National Anthem*, it's not Perfectly Proper to clink glasses in a toast - and it will be impossible to get people to stop doing either. These deviations from Perfect Propriety have now become Standard Operating Procedure.
What makes the custom of clinking glasses so awkward is the superstition that everyone's glass must touch everyone else's. In Modern Manners: Tools to Take You to the Top, authors Dorothea Johnson and Liv Tyler allow groups of two or four to "gently clink glasses." Clinking gets difficult as the length of the table or the size of the group grows, and it increases the risk of spillage and breakage. One sees people at opposite ends of the table half-rising in their chairs and straining to tilt their glasses to meet in the center; they risk baptising the tablecloth. Much simpler and less time-consuming for everyone just to repeat the toast, lift their glasses, and take a sip.
A SIP! It was a long, long, long time ago when one drained the glass at a toast. Toss that back and you run the risk of getting a reputation of enjoying your wine too much.
Etiquetteer much prefers the custom of "taking wine," which requires nothing but locking eyes with another for a Significant Brief Moment, lifting one's glass discreetly in that person's direction, and taking a sip. Perhaps this custom is what inspired Ben Jonson's famous "Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes." There's a wonderful description of it in What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew: "The custom of 'taking wine' - which called for catching the eye of someone else, looking meaningfully at them, and raising one's glass in their direction which they raised theirs eloquently back - would have vanished by the 1860s except in eccentric rustic households."
One toasting custom that has changed is that one no longer breaks the wineglass to keep it from serving any "less honorable purpose." Etiquetteer learned this early in life, drinking the Pure Milk of the Word of Emily Post (1937 edition). At a bachelor dinner, the groom was supposed to rise, toast the bride, and then break the stem of the glass. Those present were to follow his example and then toss all the broken glass into the fireplace**.
This Splendid Gesture wasn't always confined to bachelor dinners. Theodore Roosevelt wrote to his son Archie during World War I about their wife and mother Edith making a rare order for a glass of wine after luncheon. After a toast to Archie, ". . . Mother, her eyes shining, her cheeks flushed, as pretty as a picture, and as spirited as any heroine of romance, dashed her glass on the floor, shvering it in pieces, saying 'That glass shall never be drunk out of again'; and the rest of us followed suit and broke our glasses too."***
After that "Let's cheers" from your Breezy Pal, Etiquetteer will allow you to follow up, gently, with a Perfectly Proper "Now let's toast . . . " so that you can Set a Good Example with your own Perfect Propriety.
Not sure what beverage to toast with? View Etiquetteer's video above.
*Acts of patriotism are not applauded.
**Dear Mrs. Post, bless her, thought that breaking glasses and singing loudly was as much of an "orgy" as a bachelor dinner was. Etiquetteer raises a toast to her naïveté.
***Quoted in The Lion's Pride: Theodore Roosevelt and His Family in Peace and War, by Edward J. Renehan, Jr. (page 176)