Compared with the table manners of peasants and kings in the Middle Ages
–people who mistrusted forks and other eating equipment–those of today`s young people represent a period of high manners. But that`s not saying much.
”I went to Harvard and I saw just horrible things,” said 25-year-old Mary Elizabeth McNary, of Newton, Mass. ”One time, I saw a guy take one of those squares of cake, the ones with the pink frosting, and cut off a large bite with his fork, then pick up the bite with his hand, harpoon it on the fork and stuff it in his mouth. I maintained stricken silence.”
The nation`s restaurants and corporate dining halls, it seems, are filled these days with men and women in their 20s and 30s who hold their forks like shovels and their knives like saws. They reach across one another for the butter or the salt, neglect to pass the bread, start eating before others are served, tuck their napkins in their collars or forget them altogether and wave their utensils around like little flags at a parade.
During the last 20 years the fundamentals of table manners–maneuvers intended to keep the appetites of dining companions intact, like closing the mouth to chew and sipping without slurping–seem to have been lost on many of America`s young people. In addition, a number of these young people seem unaware of the very essence of good manners, which is not to offend, according to the experts.
”The way in which you turn a knife is relative, and it varies from culture to culture,” said Ray Birdwhistell, an anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania. ”Manners are merely a set of rules that allow you to engage in a social ritual. They are a way of telling the other person that it is an honor to be able to eat with them. But that is also one of the reasons adolescents use them as a way of rebellion, as a point of hostility.” Fork? What fork?
Historians, sociologists, teachers and etiquette experts say that dining standards have reached a low for this century. For an explanation, they cite the demise of the traditional evening meal, when families gathered to eat and parents were quick to pounce on errant manners. They also point to the growth of fast food and ready-to-eat meals, and the fact that individual freedom has come to be valued over decorum.
”Most of the young people who come to the major business schools have never really thought about table manners,” said Curtis W. Tarr, dean of the Johnson School of Management at Cornell University, who up until a year ago was a corporate executive. ”Even in the officers` dining room, they look around and say, `What is all this?` and `How do you use these?` ”
”There is considerably less concern today about table manners than in previous years,” said Norman Goodman, chairman of the sociology department at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. ”There is simply no easy acceptance of social niceties anymore.”
”I am absolutely convinced,” said William H. Placke, an executive vice president of the Midlantic National Bank in Edison, N.J., ”that as time has passed and as the age of the banking industry has dropped, table manners are not given the attention they need in the course of growing up or in any other setting. It`s our job now to make them part of our formal training program, just as we train them to analyze a lending option.”
Letitia Baldrige, the White House social secretary during the Kennedy administration and now an etiquette consultant and writer, says today`s table manners are ”anywhere from horrible to most horrible.”
Young people themselves recognize that something has gone wrong.
Hands-on spaghetti
Myles Marks, a 15-year-old from Highland Park, said that before he left home for boarding school, ”I personally ate like a slob.
”I once went to a big dinner meeting with my father, and I ate the spaghetti with my hands,” he said. ”I would slurp it up and put it in my mouth. My dad took some grief about it.”
Marks is now a sophomore at the Berkshire School, a private boarding school in Massachusetts that has formal dinners where students eat with faculty. Marks says he takes his lead from the other students. ”When we have spaghetti,” he said, ”you roll it up real tightly on your fork and put in your mouth with the fork.”
When Nathan G. Simmons, a 20-year-old sophomore at Fisk University in Nashville, started his summer job teaching etiquette to junior members of the Boys Choir of Harlem, he found that ”they basically didn`t know of any table manners–they grew up sitting in front of the television and eating.
”It`s easy to eat at McDonald`s,” said Simmons, a former choir member himself. ”But when you need good table manners, you need to know.”
Despite the criticism, however, a number of historians said the nation is just experiencing a slump after more than a century of esthetic dining. The young people, they say, are not so much harbingers as missing links. In the 11th Century, for example, a member of the Venetian aristocracy was severely rebuked by an ecclesiastic for using a fork, instead of only a knife, as was common then.
The cleric called down divine wrath on her for ”so excessive a sign of refinement.” She died soon after, apparently from the plague, but several religious figures at the time deemed her death a just punishment from God.
It was not until the 16th Century that one could safely use a fork in public, and as late as the 17th Century it was still essentially a luxury article of the upper class. What we think of as acceptable table manners today were first practiced toward the end of the 18th Century by the French upper class and other nations and societies followed, according to Elias.
Blame Jefferson
Judith Martin, who writes the Miss Manners etiquette column, recently gave a lecture at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, the basis for her recently published book, ”Common Courtesy,” in which she said the deterioration of table manners actually started with Thomas Jefferson, or at least with the nation`s founders and their fondness for equality and hatred of false civility.
She noted that Jefferson–who had excellent manners, as did many of the Virginians in government at the time–attempted during his presidency to ease the rules of diplomatic ranking in the capital because he felt they imposed artificial distinctions among men who had been created equal.
Nevertheless, for 100 years or so, Americans seemed to have worked out a compromise between the artificiality of good manners and the unfettered honesty of slovenliness. At Yale University in the 1950s, for example, no rules were needed about dressing for dinner, because ”no one would consider going to a meal without a coat and tie,” according to George D. Vaill, retired associate secretary to the university and its unofficial historian.
All that ended in the 1960s, according to Vaill and the other historians. ”That`s when we had to have a rule requiring they wear shoes to dinner,”
he said.
Things have hardly improved.
