George Washington 2.0, Vol. 11, Issue 5

In honor of Presidents Day, and the Father of our Country's birthday on February 22, Etiquetteer is going to update parts of George Washington's Rules of Civility and Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation. Etiquetteer bets you didn't even know George Washington wrote an etiquette book! He copied 110 maxims when he was only 14. Several of these have to do with precedence and are, shall we say, overly exaggerated for the 21st century. But others remain classic at the core, and need to be restated. For instance:

GW 1.0: "7th, Put not off your clothes in the presence of others, nor go out of your chamber half-dressed.

GW 2.0: The idea is, you show respect for others by looking put together in public. Don't leave the house until you're completely dressed; for ladies this means completely made up, too. No one should have to see these things in action: mascara wands, buttons, belts, and especially underwear. Say no to the fashion of sagging! Say no to gaposis! And, as Etiquetteer mentioned earlier this year, don't wear your pajamas in public!

GW 1.0: "18th, Read no letters, books, or papers in company; but when there is necessity for the doing of it, you must ask leave."

GW 2.0: George's essential truth is still sound, that the person with you in person is more important than the person with you through another medium. Do not text or take or make phone calls in the presence of others, especially at the table, unless you ask permission first. This is especially difficult at table, or in a car, when your prisoners - um, Etiquetteer means companions - might be unable to continue talking themselves while waiting on you.

GW 1.0: "22nd, Show not yourself glad at the misfortune of another, though he were your enemy" and "23rd, When you see a crime punished, you may be inwardly pleased, but always show pity to the suffering offender."

GW 2.0: Refrain from flaming on online comment boards, especially anonymously. It's no surprise that people give in to their baser instincts when their identities are concealed. Such behavior does, however, brand one a coward.This is only one reason you'll never see a comment board here at etiquetteer.com (not that readers of Etiquetteer behave that way, of course.)

GW 1.0: "48th, Wherein you reprove another be unblameable yourself, for example is more prevalent than precept."

GW 2.0: Simply put, "Practice what you preach." It is very bad form, for instance, to advocate for the sanctity of marriage when one has been divorced, and certainly when one has been divorced more than once.

GW 1.0: "50th, Be not hasty to believe flying reports to the disparagement of any" and "79th, Be not apt to relate news if you know not the truth thereof."

GW 2.0: Don't trust what you read on the Internet and do your own research. Sad to say, partisans on every side of the political spectrum, in their eagerness to paint as dark a picture as possible of their opponents, do not adhere as zealously to Truth as they ought. Inflammatory email that gets circulated and recirculated, charts and graphs that appear on social media such as Facebook, more often than not contain errors of fact, bald or nuanced. All this has led Etiquetteer to take refuge in the pages of The Economist.

GW 1.0: "110th, Labour to keep alive in your breast the little celestial fire called conscience."

GW 2.0: No change needed for GW 2.0. This little phrase still summarizes the entire book perfectly.

Hell Is Other People, Vol. 6, Issue 33

Jean-Paul Sartre once famously opined (Etiquetteer thinks it was in No Exit) that "Hell is other people." Etiquetteer cordially invites you to share what behavior of other people irritates you. Please drop a line to query <at> etiquetteer.com Dear Etiquetteer: What do you think about people who use their cell phones to carry on long and very loudconversations in public places, such as on trains and buses, or in restaurants? Or even on airlines when they are allowed. And there is the public HEALTH risk of drivers so preoccupied with their calls that they run over pedestrians and bicyclists. It’s referred to as DWD: driving while distracted. Dear Tintinnabulaphobic: People like these, Etiquetteer has decided, must have low self-esteem and feel the need to call attention to themselves, and therefore making themselves more important. That the attention is negative doesn’t seem to make a difference. It would be easy to peg this behavior as lower-class, but many offenders have graduated from the finest business schools (AHEM!). Etiquetteer remembers, from the dim past of 1994, his first trip to Los Angeles. Cell phones were just beginning to become available to the public, and Etiquetteer and his friends were agog to see peopleactually talking on the phone right there on the street! Let’s just say the honeymoon is over. You have the power to disconcert public cell phone yakkers by asking them personal questions about their phone calls. Proceed with caution; Etiquetteer disclaims all responsibility if they beat you up. DWD is certainly becoming more of a problem. Last year Etiquetteer referred to a young woman in the Midwest who killed a man while she was simultaneously driving and downloading ringtones. And Etiquetteer will never forget riding in a car driven by a friend who was operating the car, the phone, and a personal digital assistance at the same time. Please drivers, hang up and drive! Dear Etiquetteer: For almost 50 years I've been friends with a man from my home state. We email infrequently, but I always manage to see him on the rare occasions when I return for a visit. My situation is that he keeps sending me email of a religious nature, long silly stories about how prayer has saved a grieving family, etc, or how the rainbows will come out if you just believe. He is a devout Baptist; I am an atheist, though he doesn't actually know this. Not only have I jettisoned my faith, I consider religion a pernicious deception of the gullible and an obstacle to the general love of mankind. As one can imagine, his emails make me acutely uncomfortable. My problem is: do I (gently and tactfully) request that he stop sending me these ludicrous messages, stressing the fact that I would rather hear about what he's doing and thinking, or do I remain silent and simply erase the damned things? Dear Persecuted and Scornful: You can finesse the whole thing without even mentioning your change of religious beliefs. Ask your friend to take you off his distribution list (Etiquetteer assumes that he is sending his e-mail messages to more friends than yourself) because you find your mailbox so full of general communications such as this that you can’t keep up with specific e-mail from friends. (Once upon a time such specific communications were known as "letters" and they came in the mailbox.) Tell your friend that you still want to hear from him, but enjoy much more e-mail messages that he’s written himself. This is a good place for Etiquetteer to remind everyone that the best way to forward humor, religious, or political posts (once referred to as "chain mail" when the postman delivered it) is to bcc: all the recipients and put your own e-mail address in the To: field. You not only preserve the privacy of your correspondents, but you also eliminate the possibility of annoying flame wars. Etiquetteer cordially invites you to join the notify list if you would like to know as soon as new columns are posted. Join by sending e-mail to notify <at> etiquetteer.com

Personal Relationships, Vol. 4, Issue 11

Dear Etiquetteer: I'm visiting friends overseas, a male couple I've known and loved for almost 20 years. Let's call them B and D. They have another friend, S.M., whom I've known almost as long, a vinegary, old-maidish man who can sometimes be a lot of fun. Unfortunately S.M. is also an extremely needy, hypochondriacal complainer who takes umbrage at any slight, and goes into a towering sulk whenever he feels he's being neglected, which is most of the time. At the beginning of any conversation he sails into a litany of his health problems that lasts for at least five minutes, but one can live with that. He's also hopelessly in love with D, and a couple of years ago they had a falling-out, to D's everlasting relief. I come over to visit every couple of years, and always stay with B and D. I always call S.M., too, and did so the other night. S.M. agreed to meet me away from the house, since he dreads, or affects to dread, meeting D. A few minutes later he called back and said that it would be best, since "I am not welcome at B and D's house," that we not meet. I insisted that I wanted to see him, but he went into his wounded dowager mode and refused to see me. At the end of the conversation I said, "Well, then I'll write to you, since I do want to stay in touch." But he sniffily said, "You can write if you like, but don't expect me to answer," at which point I hung up, absolutely stunned and quite hurt. B, when told about this, was incandescent with rage, and immediately called S.M. to give him a blistering dressing-down. It wasn't until later that I stopped feeling hurt and began to feel angry. I wrote S.M. a long and devastatingly frank letter which made me feel TERRIFIC, and which I knew I could not send. So I didn't. Have I exhausted my obligations to try to reconnect with this man? Dear Rebuffed: The late Coco Chanel, referring to her friend and fellow drug addict Misia Sert, famously said, "We only love our friends for their faults. Misia gave me ample reason to love her." While that dictum might generally apply to mild personal idiosyncrasies (such as consistently arriving late, never sending Lovely Notes, or rubbing a wedge of lime behind each ear when served a gin and tonic), Etiquetteer would find it a masochistic stretch to apply it to personal abuse such as you describe.You, sir, have been snubbed. Based on your description of S.M., Etiquetteer would not find his occasional bouts of fun overbalance his 24/7 impersonation of Anne Elliott’s married sister from Jane Austen’s Persuasion. In other words, you’re better off without this character.This only leaves Etiquetteer the opportunity to thank you for following the example of the late President Abraham Lincoln, by writing that angry letter and not sending it. President Lincoln was wise in many things, and this was one of the wisest. Find yourself at a manners crossroads and don't know where to go? Ask Etiquetteer at query@etiquetteer.com! Etiquetteer cordially invites you to join the notify list if you would like to know as soon as new columns are posted. Join by sending e-mail to notify@etiquetteer.com.