vitanola
I'll Lock Up
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- 4,254
- Location
- Gopher Prairie, MI
Most of my experience has been in the context of fundraising events, "galas," and other types of activities where you have, basically two types of people -- elderly old-money people smelling of mothballs and social-climbing bourgies who want to be sure they're "seen" mixing with the right crowd. This type of event is extremely common here, and my workplace is a common venue for them. They are among the most distinctly joyless events I've ever had to be around -- nobody laughs, nobody smiles, nobody seems to be enjoying themselves. The phrase "working a room" was coined to describe these horrors, where "etiquette" and "form" are frozen substitutes for any sort of soul. You attend enough of these, and you pray for Harpo Marx to come running into the room, upending the registration table and pouring cheese dip down some dowager's decolletage. I just don't understand how people can take such things so terribly, terribly seriously.
I used to have to go to banquets when I was in radio, and do not have fond memories of having to sit opposite the station owner and pretend that I wasn't secretly dreaming of gutting him out with a serving fork. The food stunk, too.
There are those who theorize that all "etiquette" is an attempt to enforce the power of the dominant social order -- a way of assigning every individual a "proper place" and keeping every individual in their proper place:
"The ritual order of etiquette, by sternly guarding against slips in bodily and emotional control, ensured the individual's deferential participation in the dominant social order. Instead of allowing any relaxation, bourgeois etiquette drove the tensions back within the individual self, providing ritual support for the psychological defense mechanisms of repression, displacement and denial necessary to cope with the necessities of the urban capitalist order. "
-- John F. Kasson, Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth Century Urban America, p.165
I tend to agree with that, myself. History shows us over and over again that power uses all possible mechanisms to perpetuate itself in social, cultural, and political relationships. Ritualized etiquette is one of those mechanisms.
In the larger sense you are probably correct. In the smaller, day-to-day sense, though, the niceties of proper etiquette are supposed to smooth things along and keep anyone from feeling uncomfortable. I remember one author of a book on table manners emphatically insisting that the only inexcusable faux-pas would be calling attention to a guest's error in table usage. Hostesses were warned to set their table so that their guests would be comfortable. An appropriately gracious host will ignore, or in some cases join in in "non standard" usages, for drinking from a finger bowl along with a guest is less to be deplored than making the guest feel in any way uncomfortable. Unfortunately too many strivers have over the years chosen to use etiquette as a weapon against those whom they perceive to be beneath them, or as a shibboleth. Alas! such is the way of the world. If anything can be weaponized, it will be weaponized.
For what it's worth, here are a few pointers, courtesy of The Happiness Boys:
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