Of course table manners are a substantial part of Perfect Propriety, because there is no easier way for others to form an impression of the type of person you are from them. Not just whether you know what you’re doing or not, but how well you handle mistakes and crises at the table — your own, or someone else’s. Lillian Eichler said it best in her Today’s Etiquette of 1941: “. . . and if a blunder is made, let it pass! It is no very great crime to make a trifling mistake in table conduct, and if one’s manner is free from self-consciousness and embarrassment it is quite probable that no one will notice it.”
It’s more common than you think for people to mistake someone else’s glass or utensil for their own. If you find that you’ve drunk out of someone else’s glass or used their fork, apologize when it’s pointed out and ask the waiter (or your hosts) for a new one. (Hosts should have a supply near at hand in the dining room so they don’t have to travel far.) If someone has used your utensils, no one should have to be embarrassed to say “I’m so sorry, but that’s my glass. We’ve gotten our settings mixed up.”
Unique crises leave us guessing what to do sometimes. At tea in London one day poor Emily Kimbrough was so excited to meet matinée idol Gilbert Miller that she '“ate the pink baby ribbon which was tied around the sandwiches. It was hard to chew and even harder to swallow because it got untied in transit and she had to gulp it down like a stomach-pump. But to pull it out hand over hand would have been even more spectacular, so she washed it down with tea . . . Gilbert Miller never took his eyes off her.”** As a general rule, if something gets into your mouth that isn’t supposed to be there, like a bone or an olive pit, it’s most Perfectly Proper to remove it unobtrusively and put it on your plate. If that can’t be achieved, much better to excuse yourself.***
Emily Post Herself made news when she spilled a sauceboat of lingonberries over herself and the tablecloth at a 1938 public dinner of the New York Gourmet Society. The society’s president gallantly tried to blame a waiter, but Mrs. Post, with equally gallantry, refused to let anyone else take the blame for her error.****
Reacting or not to the Behavior of Others is sometimes more of a challenge. Etiquetteer will never forget sitting next to the temperamental old gentleman at a wedding banquet some 40 years ago who deliberately spat into Etiquetteer’s empty coffee cup*. A quiet word to the waiter was sufficient to get a new cup, but really.
Etiquetteer wishes you table companions with good manners, good instincts, and good appetites. What could be more Perfectly Proper?
*Etiquetteer had been invited as a colleague’s “plus one” to this out-of-state family wedding, and hasn’t seen anyone from that day since. It seems clear that families invite “plus ones” to insulate them from family members they’d rather not deal with themselves. There are better ways to spend a summer Saturday.
** From Etiquetteer’s beloved Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, by Cornelia Otis Skinner and Emily Kimbrough.
***Of course if you’re actually choking to death, it’s most Perfectly Proper to make the Universal Sign of Choking so someone can start the Heimlich maneuver on you.
****Emily Post, by Laura Claridge, pages 369-370.