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Introduction – When Push
Comes to Shove
If you want a short-cut to an alien culture these days, there is no quicker
route than to look at a French phrase book. Not because the language is different,
but because the first lesson you will fi nd there usually takes place in a shop.
“Good morning, madam.”
“Good morning, sir.”
“How may I help you?”
“I would like some tomatoes/eggs/postage stamps please.”
“Of course. How many tomatoes/eggs/postage stamps would you like?”
“Seven/five/twelve, thank you.”
“That will be six/four/two Euros. Do you have the exact money?”
“I do.”
“Thank you, madam.”
“Thank you, sir. Good day!”
“Good day!”
Now the amazing thing is, this formal and civil exchange actually represents
what happens in French shops. French shopkeepers really say good morning and
goodbye; they answer questions; they wrap things ever so nicely; and when it’s
all over, they wave you off like a near relation. There is none of the dumb,
resentful shrugging we English shoppers have become so accustomed to. Imagine
an English phrase book for French visitors, based on the same degree of verisimilitude
– let’s call it “Dans le magasin”.
“Excuse me, do you work here?”
“What?”
“I said, excuse me, do you work here?”
“Not if I can help it, har, har, har.”
“Do you have any tomatoes/eggs/postage stamps?”
“Well, make your mind up, that’s my mobile.”
This book has quite a modest double aim: first, to mourn, without much mature
perspective or academic rigour, the apparent collapse of civility in all areas
of our dealings with strangers; then to locate a tiny flame of hope in the rubble
and fan it madly with a big hat. Does this project have any value? Well, in
many ways, no. None at all. First, it is hardly original or controversial to
declare oneself as being against rudeness. (One is reminded of that famous objection
to the “Women Against Rape” campaign: “Are there any women for
rape?”) Secondly, it seems that an enormous amount of good stuff has been
written on this subject already, and the plate has been licked pretty clean.
Thirdly, and even more discouragingly, as long ago as 1971, the great sociologist
Erving Goffman wrote that “concern about public life has heated up far
beyond our capacity to throw light on it”. So, to sum up: it’s not
worth saying; it’s already been said; and it’s impossible to say anything
adequate in any case. This is the trouble with doing research.
However, just as my book on punctuation was fundamentally about finding oneself
mysteriously at snapping point about something that seemed a tad trivial compared
with war, famine, and the imminent overthrow of Western civilisation, so is
Talk to the Hand. I just want to describe and analyse an automatic eruption
of outrage and frustration that can at best cloud an otherwise lovely day, and
at worst make you resolve to chuck yourself off the nearest bridge. You are
lying in a dentist’s chair, for example, waiting quietly for an anaesthetic
to “take”, and the dental nurse says, next to your left ear, “Anyway,
I booked that flight and it had gone up forty quid.” At which the dentist
says, in your right ear, “No! What, in two hours?” And you say, rather
hotly, “Look, I’m not unconscious, you know”, and then they don’t
say anything, but you know they are rolling their eyes at each other, and agreeing
that you are certifiable or menopausal, or possibly both.
Whether it’s merely a question of advancing years bringing greater intolerance
I don’t think I shall bother to establish. I will just say that, for my
own part, I need hardly defend myself against any knee-jerk “grumpy old
woman” accusations, being self-evidently so young and fresh and liberal
and everything. It does, however, have to be admitted that the outrage reflex
(“Oh, that’s so RUDE!”) presents itself in most people at just
about the same time as their elbow-skin starts to give out. Check your own elbow
skin. If it snaps back into position after bending, you probably should not
be reading this book. If, on the other hand, it just sits there in a puckered
fashion, a bit rough and belligerent, then you can probably also name about
twenty things, right now, off the top of your head, that drive you nuts: people
who chat in the cinema; young people sauntering four-abreast on the pavement;
waiters who say, “There you go” as they place your bowl of soup on
the table; people not even attempting to lower their voices when they use the
“Eff” word. People with young, flexible elbow-skin spend less time
defining themselves by things they don’t like. Warn a young person that
“Each man becomes the thing he hates”, and he is likely to reply,
quite cheerfully, that that’s OK, then, since the only thing he really
hates is broccoli.
By contrast, I now can’t abide many, many things, and am actually always
on the look-out for more things to find completely unacceptable. Whenever I
hear of someone being “gluten intolerant” or “lactose intolerant”,
moreover, I feel I’ve been missing out. I want to be gluten intolerant
too. I mean, how much longer do we have to put up with that gluten crap? Lactose
has had its own way long enough. Yet I still, amazingly, deny a rightward drift
in my thinking. I merely ask: isn’t it odd, the way many nice, youngish
liberal people are beginning secretly to admire the chewing-gum penalties of
Singapore? Isn’t it odd, the way nice, youngish liberal people, when faced
with a teenaged boy skateboarding in Marks & Spencer’s, feel a righteous
urge to stick out a foot and send him somersaulting into a rack of sensible
shoes? I will admit that the mere thought of taking such direct and beautiful
vengeance – “There he goes!” – fills me with a profound
sort of joy.
!#*!
Why is this not a handbook to good manners? Why will you not fi nd rules about
holding doors open, using a mobile phone, and sending thank-you notes? I have
several reasons for thinking that the era of the manners book has simply passed.
First, what would be the authority of such a book, exactly? Why would anyone
pay attention to it? This is an age of lazy moral relativism combined with aggressive
social insolence, in which many people have been trained to distrust and reject
all categorical answers, and even (I’ve noticed with alarm) to dispute
points of actual law without having the shadow of a leg to stand on. However,
this is not to say that manners are off the agenda in today’s rude world.
Far from it. In fact, what is so interesting about our charming Eff-Off society
is that perceived rudeness probably irritates rough, insolent people even more
than it peeves polite, deferential ones. As the American writer Mark Caldwell
points out in his excellent A Short History of Rudeness (1999), if you
want to observe status-obsessed people who are exquisitely sensitive to slights,
don’t read an Edith Wharton novel, visit San Quentin. Rudeness is a universal
fl ashpoint. My main concern in writing this book is to work out why, all of
a sudden, this is the case.
Another argument against laying down rules of etiquette is that we no longer
equate posh behaviour with good behaviour, which is a splendid development,
posh people being notoriously cruel to wildlife and apt to chuck bread rolls
at each other when excited. Who wants to behave like a posh person? I know I
don’t. I recently met a very posh person, the husband of (let’s say)
a theatrical producer, and when I asked if he was himself in (let’s say)
theatrical producing, he just said, “Oh God, no”, and refused to elaborate.
Is this good manners? Well, the best you can say about it is that it’s
very English, which is not the same. As the anthropologist Kate Fox points out
in her fascinating Watching the English (2004), it is a point of honour
in English society to effect all social introductions very, very badly. “One
must appear self-conscious, ill-at-ease, stiff, awkward, and above all, embarrassed,”
she writes. The handshake should be a confusion of half-gestures, apologies,
and so on. And as for cheek-kissing, it is an established rule that someone
will always have to say, “Oh, are we doing two?” Also essential in
the introductory process, she says, is that on no account should you volunteer
your own name or ask a direct question to establish the identity of the person
you are speaking to.
!#*!
I must admit that this last rule explained quite a lot to me. My standard
behaviour at parties is to announce straight away who I am, and then work quite
strenuously to ascertain the name and profession of the person I’m speaking
to – mainly because I wish to avoid that familiar heart-stopping moment
at the end of the evening when the host says, “So what did you make of
my old friend the Archbishop of Canterbury, then? Looks good in mufti, doesn’t
he? You seemed to be telling him off-colour jokes for hours.” However,
it turns out that asking direct questions is socially naff, while the “Oh
God, no” response is the one that is actually demanded by the compensatory
instincts of good breeding. No wonder I have so often ended up playing Twenty
Questions with chaps who seem to pride themselves on being Mister Clam the Mystery
Man.
“So. Here we are at Tate Modern,” I say. “I’m afraid I
didn’t catch your name. I expect you are front-page famous which will make
this an embarrassing story to tell all my clued-up friends.”
“Oh no.”
“No?”
“Well, I’m known to a select few, I suppose. Mainly abroad. Nineteen.”
“Pardon?”
“You’ve got nineteen questions left. You’ve just used one.”
“Oh. Oh, I see. All right. Are you in the arts?”
“No, no. Nothing like that. Eighteen.”
“Are you animal, vegetable or mineral, ha ha?”
“Mm. Like everybody, I believe, I’m mainly water. Seventeen.”
“I see. Well. Look. Are you the Archbishop of Canterbury?”
“No. Although there have been some famous clerics in the female line.
Sixteen.”
“Do your bizarre trousers hold any clue to your profession?”
“How very original of you to draw attention to my bizarre trousers. Fifteen.”
“Do you own a famous stately home in the north of England?”
“Um, why do you ask?”
“Just a wild stab.” “Well, I like your style, but no. Fourteen.”
“I give up. Who are you?”
“Not allowed. Thirteen.”
“All right. I was trying to avoid this. If I got someone strong to pin
your arms back, where would I find your wallet?”
It’s always been this way, apparently, in so-called polite society. People
go out and meet other people, but only so that they can come home again without
anyone piercing the veil of their anonymity in the period in between. George
Mikes made a related point in his wonderful How to be an Alien (1946):
“The aim of introduction [in England] is to conceal a person’s identity.
It is very important that you should not pronounce anybody’s name in a
way that the other party may be able to catch it.”
Until recently, of course, people did aspire to posh manners. Hence the immense
popularity, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in both Britain and America,
of books that satisfied middleclass anxieties and aspirations – and incidentally
fuelled snobbery. Books such as Letitia Baldridge’s Complete Guide to
the New Manners for the ’90s (referring to the 1890s) or the umpteen
editions since 1922 of Emily Post’s Etiquette: the Blue Book of Social
Usage existed because they were needed: as society became more fluid, people
found themselves in unfamiliar situations, where there was a danger that they
would embarrass themselves by punching the hotel porter for stealing their suitcase,
or swigging from a fingerbowl, or using the wrong fork to scratch their noses
with. Cue the loud, general gasp of well-bred horror. Well, sod all that, quite
frankly, and good riddance. Old-fashioned manners books have an implicit message:
“People better than you know how to behave. Just follow these rules and
with a bit of good luck your true origins may pass undetected.” It is no
accident that the word “etiquette” derives from the same source as
“ticket”. It is no accident, either, that adherence to “manners”
has broken down just as money and celebrity have largely replaced birth as the
measure of social status.
All of which leaves the etiquette book looking a bit daft. “Wait until
the credits are rolling before standing up to leave,” I see in one recent
guide to polite behaviour. “Don’t text when you’re with other
people,” says another. “A thank-you letter is not obligatory, although
one can be sent to the Lord Steward of the Royal Household.” I experience
a great impatient ho-hum in the face of such advice. Once you leave behind such
class concerns as how to balance the peas on the back of a fork, all the important
rules surely boil down to one: remember you are with other people; show some
consideration. A whole book telling you to do that would be a bit repetitive.
However, I do recommend Debrett’s for its incidental Gosford
Park delights. There is, for example, a good, dark little story in the most
recent edition about a well-bred country gentleman with suicidal intent who
felt it wasn’t right to shoot himself before entering his own name in the
Game Book. You have to admire such dedication to form. For anyone wishing to
follow his example, by the way, he listed himself under “Various.”
Manners never were enforceable, in any case. Indeed, for many philosophers,
this is regarded as their chief value: that they are voluntary. In 1912, the
jurist John Fletcher Moulton claimed in a landmark speech that the greatness
of a nation resided not in its obedience to laws, but in its abiding by conventions
that were not obligatory. “Obedience to the unenforceable” was the
phrase that was picked up by other writers – and it leads us to the most
important aspect of manners: their philosophical elusiveness. Is there a clear
moral dimension to manners? Can you equate civility and virtue? My own answer
would be yes, despite all the famous counter-examples of blood-stained dictators
who had exquisite table manners and never used their mobile phone in a crowded
train compartment to order mass executions. It seems to me that, just as the
loss of punctuation signalled the vast and under-acknowledged problem of illiteracy,
so the collapse of manners stands for a vast and under-acknowledged problem
of social immorality. Manners are based on an ideal of empathy, of imagining
the impact of one’s own actions on others. They involve doing something
for the sake of other people that is not obligatory and attracts no reward.
In the current climate of unrestrained solipsistic and aggressive self-interest,
you can equate good manners not only with virtue but with positive heroism.
Philosophers are, of course, divided on all this – but then most of them
didn’t live in the first years of the twenty-first century. Aristotle said
that, if you want to be good, it’s not a bad idea to practise (I’m
paraphrasing). In the seventeenth century, Thomas Hobbes said that the rights
and wrongs of picking your teeth weren’t worthy of consideration (I’m
paraphrasing again). In the 1760s, Immanuel Kant said that manners could not
be reckoned as virtues, because they called for “no large measure of moral
determination”; on the other hand, he thought they were a means of developing
virtue. In November 2004, however, the philosopher Julian Baggini wrote in The
Guardian, rather compellingly, that our current alarm at the state of manners
derives from our belated understanding that, in rejecting oldfashioned niceties,
we have lost a great deal more than we bargained for:
The problem is that we have failed to distinguish between pure etiquette,
which is simply a matter of arbitrary social rules designed mainly to distinguish
between insiders and outsiders; and what might grandly be called quotidian ethics:
the morality of our small, everyday interactions with other people.
My small, personal reason for not writing a traditional etiquette book is not
very laudable, but the phrase “a rod for one’s own back” is a
bit of a clue to the way I’m thinking. If my experience as Queen of the
Apostrophe has taught me anything, it has impressed on me that, were I to adopt
“zero tolerance” as my approach to manners, I would never be able
to yawn, belch, or scratch my bottom again without someone using it as watertight
proof that I know not whereof I speak. Is it worth it? Zero Tolerance Manners
Woman Ignores Person Who Knows Her Shock. “She walked straight past
me,” said wounded friend of 25 years, who was recovering yesterday at home.
“She is also rubbish at punctuation, if you ask me. You should see her
emails.”
Plus, in all seriousness, there are many etiquette issues on which a zero tolerance
position cannot be sensible. Take the everyday thorny problem of modern forms
of address. I receive many letters which begin, “Dear Ms/Miss/Lynne Truss”,
immediately followed by a heartfelt paragraph on the difficulty of addressing
women whose marital status isn’t clear. Well, I sympathise with this difficulty,
of course, and I am sorry to be the cause of it. I know there are many people
who dislike being addressed without a title, so I appreciate that my correspondents
are worthily trying to avoid being rude. However, as it happens, I loathe the
whole business of titles, and prefer to do without one wherever possible, considering
this a simple solution to an overelaborate problem. True, having ticked “Other”
on a number of application forms, I now receive post bizarrely addressed to
“Other Lynne Truss”, which is a bit unsettling for someone with a
rocky sense of identity, but this is still better (in my view) than going along
with this outmoded Miss/Ms/Mrs thing. My point is: there is no right and wrong
in this situation. Who could possibly legislate?
We all draw the wavy contour line between polite and rude behaviour in a different
place, much as we draw our own line in language usage. That’s why we are
always so eager to share our experiences of rudeness and feel betrayed if our
best friends say, “Ooh, I’m not sure I agree with you there; perhaps
you’ve got this out of proportion.” In Eats, Shoots & Leaves,
I alluded to Kingsley Amis’s useful self-exempting system of dividing the
world into “berks” and “wankers”: berks being those who
say, “But language has to change, surely? Why don’t we just drop that
silly old apostrophe?”, and wankers being those who say, “I would
have whole-heartedly agreed with you, Ms Truss, if you had not fatally undermined
your authority by committing a howler of considerable dimensions quite early
in the book, on page 19. I refer, of course to the phrase ‘bow of elfin
gold’. Were you to consult The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1981), you would find in letter 236 that Professor Tolkien
preferred the term ‘elven’ to ‘elfin’, but was persuaded
by his editors to change it. Also, it was the dwarves who worked with gold,
of course; not the elves. Finally, as any student of metallurgy would instantly
confirm, gold is not a suitable element from which to fashion a bow, being at
once too heavy and too malleable. With all good wishes, enjoyed your book immensely,
keep up the good work, your fan.”
!#*!
The idea of the Berk–Wanker system is that each of us feels safe from
either imputation, because we have personally arrived at a position that is
the fulcrum between the two. You may remember how the BBC always answered criticism
years ago: “I think we’ve got the balance just about right.”
Well, my point is: our attitude to manners is similarly self-defi ned and self-exonerating.
Each of us has got it just about right. If there is something we are particularly
good at, such as sending thank-you notes, we are likely to consider the thank-you
note the greatest indicator of social virtue, and will be outraged by its breach.
In an essay on press freedom in 1908, ‘Limericks and Counsels of Perfection’,
G. K. Chesterton saw this subjective rule-making as suffi cient reason in itself
for not attempting to enforce manners:
We are justified in enforcing good morals, for they belong to all mankind ...
[but] we are not justified in enforcing good manners, for good manners always
means our manners.
Basically, everyone else has bad manners; we have occasional bad moments. Everyone
else is rude; we are sometimes a bit preoccupied. So, if this book is not a
guide to manners, what is it? And what are those six good reasons to stay home
and bolt the door? Well, my only concern in this book is to define and analyse
six areas in which our dealings with strangers seem to be getting more unpleasant
and inhuman, day by day. It seemed to me, as I thought about the problem of
rudeness, that it might be useful to break it down. Manners have so many aspects
– behavioural, psychological, political, moral – yet we react to rudeness
as if it is just one thing. Understanding things sometimes helps to defuse them.
Maybe I will save the world from philistinism and yobbery with my six good reasons.
Failing that, however, I have the small, related hope that I may at least save
myself from going nuts.
1 Was That So Hard to Say?
“What ever happened to thank you?” we mutter. Ask anyone about the
escalation of rudeness, and their fi rst example is likely to be a quite animated
description of how they allowed another car to pass last Wednesday, and received
no thanks or acknowledgement; not even an infi nitesimal nod accompanied by
a briefl y extended index fi nger, which is (curiously) usually good enough
for most of us. What has happened to the rituals of what Goffman called “supportive
interchange”? They have gone disastrously awry, that’s what. Last
year I was a passenger in another woman’s car in Denver, Colorado. Waiting
at a junction, we received a wave from two young men in a car alongside. I smiled
back, and then asked my companion whether the chaps might want something. She
opened my window and called across, “Can I help you?” At which the
driver of the other car stopped smiling and yelled, “What do you mean,
can I help you? I was only being Effing friendly! Why don’t you get back
to your Cherry Creek Country Club, you rich bitches!” and drove off. Of
course, we were both taken aback. My companion, interestingly, was upset most
by the insulting accusation of wealth. It annoyed her very much to be called
a rich bitch. For my own part, however, I just kept thinking, “But surely
a simple ‘No, thank you’ would have sufficed? What was wrong with
‘No, thank you’ in that situation?”
There is a theory of manners that uses the fiscal image of balancing the books,
and I consider it a good one to begin with. For every good deed there is a proportionate
acknowledgement which precisely repays the giver; in this world of imaginary
expenditure and income, the aim is to emerge from each transaction with no one
in the red. This involves quite a lot of sophisticated mental micro-calculation
and fine moral balancing, so it’s small wonder that many people now find
that they simply can’t be arsed. Nowadays, you open a door for somebody
and instead of saying, “Thank you”, they just think, “Oh good”
and go through it. This can be very annoying if you are standing there expectantly
with your pen poised and your manners ledger open at the right page. All you
can enter in the credit columns is flower doodles, and these in no way salve
your shock and disappointment.
Why are people adhering less to the Ps and Qs? Where does that leave those
of us who wince every day at the unspoken “thank you” or the unthoughtof
“sorry”? Is there a strategy for cancelling the debt? Should we abandon
our expectations of reciprocity? And isn’t it confusing that our biggest
experience of formal politeness comes from the recorded voices on automated
switchboards – who patently don’t mean it? “We are sorry we cannot
connect you at this time,” says the voice. But does it sound sorry? No,
it doesn’t. It is just saying the politeness words in as many different
combinations as it can think of. “Please hold. Thank you for holding. We
are sorry you are having to hold. We are sorry to say please. Thank you for
letting us say sorry. We are sorry to say thank you. Sorry, please, thank you.
Thank you, sorry, please.” An interesting rule applies here, I find: the
more polite these messages, the more apoplectic and immoderate you become, as
you lose twenty-five minutes from your life that could have been spent, more
entertainingly, de-fleaing the cat. “Thank you for choosing to wait for
an adviser,” says the voice. “Choose?” you yell back. “I
didn’t Effing choose this! Don’t tell me what I Effing chose!”
2 Why am I the One Doing This?
This is quite a new source of irritation, but it goes deep. As I noted in Eats,
Shoots & Leaves, good punctuation is analogous to good manners. The writer
who neglects spelling and punctuation is quite arrogantly dumping a lot of avoidable
work onto the reader, who deserves to be treated with more respect. I remember,
some years ago, working alongside a woman who would wearily scribble phone messages
on a pad, and then claim afterwards not to be able to read her own handwriting.
“What does that say?” she would ask, rather unreasonably, pushing
the pad at me. She was quite serious: it wasn’t a joke. I would peer at
the spidery scrawl, making out occasional words. “Oh, you’re a big
help,” she would say, fi nally chucking the whole thing at me. “I’m
going out for a smoke.” This was an unacceptable transfer of effort, in
my opinion. I spotted this at the time, and have continued to spot it. In my
opinion, there is a lot of it about.
Just as the rise of the internet sealed the doom of grammar, so modern communications
technology contributes to the end of manners. Wherever you turn for help, you
find yourself on your own. Say you phone a company to ask a question and are
blocked by that Effing automatic switchboard. What happens? Well, suddenly you
have quite a lot of work to do. There is an unacceptable transfer of effort.
In the past, you would tell an operator, “I’m calling because you’ve
sent my bill to the wrong address three times”, and the operator, who (and
this is significant) worked for this company, would attempt to put you through
to the right person. In the age of the automated switchboard, however, we are
all coopted employees of every single company we come into contact with. “Why
am I the one doing this?” we ask ourselves, twenty times a day. It is the
general wail of modern life, and it can only get worse. “Why not try our
self-check-in service?” they say, brightly. “Have you considered on-line
banking?” “Ever fancied doing you own dental work?” “DIY
funerals: the modern way.”
People who object to automated switchboards are generally dismissed as grumpy
old technophobes, of course. But to me it seems plain that modern customer relations
are just rude, because switchboards manifestly don’t attempt to meet you
half-way. Manners are about imagination, ultimately. They are about imagining
being the other person. These systems force us to navigate ourselves into channels
that are plainly for someone else’s convenience, not ours. And they then
have the nerve, incidentally, to dress this up as a kind of consumer freedom.
“Now you can do all this yourself!” is the message. “Take the
reins. Run the show. Enjoy the shallow illusion of choice and autonomy. And
by the way, don’t bother trying to by-pass this system, buddy, because
it’s a hell of a lot smarter than you are.”
This “do-it-yourself” tactic occurs so frequently, in all parts of
life, that it has become unremarkable. In all our encounters with businesses
and shops, we now half expect to be treated not as customers, but as system
trainees who haven’t quite got the hang of it yet. “We can’t
deal with your complaint today because Sharon only comes in on Tuesdays,”
they say. “Right-oh,” you say. “I’ll remember that for next
time.” In a large store, you will be trained in departmental demarcations,
so that if you are buying a towel, you have to queue at a different counter
– although there is no way you could discover this without queuing at the
wrong counter first. Nothing is designed to put the customer’s requirements
above those of the shop. The other day, in a chemist’s on Tottenham Court
Road, the pharmacist accidentally short-changed me by £1, and then, with
sincere apologies, said I would have to wait until he served his next customer
(whenever that might be), because he didn’t have a password for the till.
While we were discussing the likelihood of another customer ever happening along,
another till was opened, a few yards away. I asked if he could get me my change
from the other till, and he said, with a look of panic, “Oh no, it has
to come from this one.” Now, this was not some callow, under-educated youth.
This was a trained pharmacist; a chap with a brain. I suggested that he could
repay the other till later – and it was as though I had explained the theory
of relativity. He was actually excited by such a clever solution, which would
never have occurred to him. Lateral thinking on behalf of the customer’s
convenience simply wasn’t part of his job.
3 My Bubble, My Rules
This is the issue of “personal space”, about which we are growing
increasingly touchy. One of the great principles of manners, especially in Britain,
is respecting someone else’s right to be left alone, unmolested, undisturbed.
The sociolinguists P. Brown and S. C. Levinson, in their book Politeness:
Some Universals in Language Usage (2000), coined the useful term “negative
politeness” for this. The British are known to take this principle to extremes,
because it chimes with our natural reticence and social awkwardness, and we
are therefore simply outraged when other people don’t distinguish suffi
ciently between public and private space. The advent of the mobile phone was
a disaster for fans of negative politeness. We are forced to listen, openmouthed,
to other people’s intimate conversations, property transactions, business
arrangements, and even criminal deals. We dream up revenges, and fantasise about
pitching phones out of the window of a moving train. Meanwhile, legislation
on smoking in public places has skewed our expectations of negative politeness,
so that if a person now lights a cigarette in our presence anywhere, we cough
and gag and mutter, and furiously fan the air in front of our faces.
There is an episode of The Simpsons in which Bart has a contagious mosquito
bite, and is encased in an isolation bubble, and when he is told off for slurping
his soup, invokes the memorable constitutional right: “Hey, my bubble,
my rules.” Increasingly, we are all in our own virtual bubbles when we
are out in public, whether we are texting, listening to iPods, reading, or just
staring dangerously at other people. Concomitantly, and even more alarmingly,
our real private spaces (our homes; even our brains) have become encased in
a larger bubble that we can’t escape: a communications network which respects
no boundaries. Our computers are fair game for other computers to communicate
with at all times. Meanwhile, people call us at home to sell us things, whatever
the hour. I had a call recently from a London department store at 8pm to arrange
a delivery, and when I objected to the hour, the reply was, “Well, we’re
here until nine.” There is no escape. In a Miami hotel room last
year, I retrieved the message flashing on my phone, and found that it was from
a cold caller. I was incensed. Someone in reception was trying to sell me a
time share. In my hotel room! No wonder people are becoming so self-important,
solipsistic, and rude. It used to be just CIA agents with ear-pieces who walked
round with preoccupied, faraway expressions, and consequently regarded all the
little people as irrelevant scum. Now, understandably, it’s nearly everybody.
4 The Eff-Off Reflex
It ought to be clear by now that manners fulfi l a number of roles in social
life. Arguably, their chief role is to make us feel safe in the company of strangers.
In his book The English (1998) Jeremy Paxman says that manners seem to
have been developed by the English “to protect themselves from themselves”;
and there is an attractive theory that, back in the mists of time, language
evolved in humans simply as a less ghastly alternative to picking fl eas off
each other. We placate with good manners, especially when we apologise.
Erving Goffman, in his Relations in Public (1971), wrote that an apology
is a gesture through which an individual splits himself into two parts: the
part that is guilty of the offence, and the part that dissociates itself from
the crime and says, “I know why this was considered wrong. In fact, I think
it’s wrong myself.” Goffman also explains what is going on when a
person tells off a naughty child or dog in public: he is signalling to other
people that while he loves the child/dog, he is also responsible for the child/dog,
and since he clearly shares the general view of how the child/dog has just behaved,
the matter is in hand and everyone can calm down.
Increasingly, it seems, this splitting does not occur – and to those who
expect this traditional nod towards shared standards, the new behaviour can
be profoundly scary. Point out bad manners to anyone younger than thirty-five,
and you risk a lash-back reflex response of shocking disproportion. “Excuse
me, I think your child dropped this sweet wrapper.” “Why don’t
you Eff Off, you fat cow,” comes the automatic reply. A man on a London
bus recently told off a gang of boys, and was set on fire. Another was stabbed
to death when he objected to someone throwing food at his girlfriend. How many
of us dare to cry, “Get off that skateboard, you hooligan!” in such
a moral climate? In the old days, when the splitting occurred, a person would
apply a bit of moral honesty to a situation and admit that he deserved to be
told off. Not any more. Criticism is treated (and reacted to) as simple aggression.
And this is very frightening. As Stephen L. Carter points out in his book
Civility (1998), people now think that “I have a right to do X”
is equal to “I am beyond censure when I do X.” The comedian Jack Dee
tells the true story of a health visitor friend who was appalled to find a quite
large child still suckling from his mother. “I wonder whether we should
be putting a stop to this?” she said. At which, the boy detached himself
from the breast, told her to Eff Off, and then went back to his dinner.
One hesitates to blame television for all this because that’s such an
obvious thing to do. But, come on. Just because it’s obvious doesn’t
mean it’s not true. Popular culture is fully implicated in the all-out
plummeting of social standards. Abuse is the currency of all reality shows.
People being vulgar and rude to each other in contrived, stressful situations
is TV’s bread and butter. Meanwhile the encouragement of competitive, material
self-interest is virtually its only other theme. The message and content of
a vast amount of popular television can be summed up in the words, “And
you can Eff right Off, too.” No wonder people’s aspirations are getting
so limited, and their attitude to other people so cavalier. I got in a taxi
recently and the driver said, “Do you know what I’d do if I had a
lot of money?” I thought, well, take a holiday, buy a smallholding, give
it to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds? He said, “I’d
crash the car through the wall of that pub, drive right up to the bar, wind
down the window and say, ‘Mine’s a pint, landlord, and you can Eff
Off if you don’t like it coz I’m buying the place.’”
5 Booing the Judges
The timing was signifi cant. Emerging, bruised and a bit horrifi ed, from encounters
with the uppity British public in the 2005 election campaign, the Prime Minister,
Tony Blair, launched a campaign for the restoration of “respect”.
“A bit late,” some of us muttered, when we heard. Respect was surely
already a huge area for public concern. The humblest lip-reading TV viewer can
spot a labio-dental fricative (or “F”) being formed on the lips of
a footballer, with the result that when a permanently livid chap such as Wayne
Rooney, with his veins sticking out on his neck, and his jug-ears burning with
indigna• 33 • tion, hurls seventeen assorted labio-dental fricatives
at the referee, there is no interpreting this as, “Actually, it was a bit
of a dive, sir, but now I’ve learned my lesson and I shan’t be doing
it again.” Sport is supposed to be character-forming, but people are turning
out like Wayne Rooney, and we are in deep trouble. Blaming the parents is an
attractive option here, by the way. In 2002, the American research unit Public
Agenda published Aggravating Circumstances: a Status Report on Rudeness in
America, in which only 9 per cent of those questioned thought that children
behaved respectfully towards adults, and 71 per cent reported seeing parents
at sports events “screaming” at coaches, referees, and players.
Disrespect for older people; disrespect for professional people; disrespect
for property – every day we are newly shocked at the prevalence of this
kind of rudeness. Egalitarianism was a noble aim, as was enlightened parenting,
but both have ploughed up a lot of worms. Authority is largely perceived as
a kind of personal insult which must be challenged. On TV competitions, judges
are booed and abused for saying, “Look, I’m sorry, he can’t
dance!”, because it has become a modern tenet that success should have
only a loose connection with merit, and that when “the people” speak,
they are incontestably right. Meanwhile, old people are addressed by their first
names, teachers are brusquely informed, “That’s none of your business!”
by small children, judges are abused in court by mouthy teenagers, and it turns
out that even if you’ve got the exact money, you can’t buy this jumper
because Jason’s got the key to the till and he’s a muppet, he’s
out the back at the moment, texting his girlfriend who’s just come back
from Rhodes which was all right but she wouldn’t go again, she’s more
of a Spain person, if you know what I mean, I like Spain, I’ve been there
twelve times, but then I’m a bit of an iconoclast.
The most extreme form of non-deference, of course, is to be treated as actually
absent or invisible. People talk across you on planes, or chat between themselves
when they are serving customers. Nothing – nothing – makes
me more angry than this. I get sarcastic. I wave in people’s faces. I say
aloud, “I’m sure I’m standing here. Can you see me standing here?
Why don’t you just catch my eye for a second to acknowledge that I am standing
here?” For some time now, I have been carrying a Sooty glove-puppet on
shopping expeditions, so that I can at least have a decent conversation when
buying stuff in Ryman’s. “What’s that, Sooty? That will be £3.99?
What’s that, Sooty? Thank you very much? What’s that, Sooty? Goodbye?”
6 Someone Else Will Clean It up
Of all forms of rudeness, the hardest for a lot of people to understand is
the offence against everybody. The once-prevalent idea that, as individuals,
we have a relationship with something bigger then ourselves, or bigger than
our immediate circle, has become virtually obsolete. For this reason, many people
simply cannot see why they shouldn’t chuck their empty burger box out of
the car window. They also don’t see any reason to abide by traffic laws
unless there is a speed camera advertised. “That’s so selfi sh!”
is a cry that has no judgemental content for such people, and little other meaning
either. Yes, we have come a long way from Benjamin Rush, in 1786, writing, “Let
our pupil be taught that he does not belong to himself, but that he is public
property.” These days, of course, the child is taught to believe quite
the opposite: that public property, in the natural way of things, belongs to
him. The interesting thing is that, cut free from any sense of community, we
are miserable and lonely as well as rude. This is an age of social autism, in
which people just can’t see the value of imagining their impact on others,
and in which responsibility is always conveniently laid at other people’s
door. People are trapped in a kind of blind, brute state of materialism. “There
is no such thing as society,” Mrs Thatcher said. Well, there certainly
isn’t now. The latest Keep Britain Tidy campaign has thrown up an interesting
moral puzzler for traditionalists by targeting the obvious self-interest of
teenage litterers. It trades on – well, what else? Oral sex. Ingenious,
or what? “While you’re down there ...” runs the slogan, over
the sort of come-and-get-it-big-boy pictures you normally see on little cards
in phone booths before they are removed by the police. The idea is that, while
you’re down there, you will also place empty beer cans in the bins provided.
I have to report that my reaction to the “While you’re down there
...” posters is, to say the least, mixed. I am actually revolted by their
cynicism, disgusted by the explicitness, concerned that teenage promiscuity
might be a high price to pay for less litter, but on the other hand relieved
and pleased that, in a poster aimed at young people, the ellipsis has been used
correctly and that there is an apostrophe in the “You’re”. In
other words, it actually could have been worse.
!#*!
This book is, obviously, a big, systematic moan about modern life. And the
expression “Talk to the hand” sort of yokes it all together. “Talk
to the hand” specifi cally alludes to a response of staggering rudeness
best known from The Jerry Springer Show – “Talk to the hand,
coz the face ain’t listening”, accompanied by an aggressive palm held
out at arm’s length. I chose it for the title because it’s the way
I’ve started to see the world. Nearly sixty years ago, George Orwell wrote
in Nineteen Eighty-Four that the future was a boot stamping on a human
face for ever. I see it as a forest of belligerent and dismissive palms held
up to the human face instead. Thank you for choosing to hold for an assistant.
There’s no one here to help • 38 • you at this time. Nobody asked
you to hold the Effi ng door open. An error of type 506 has occurred. Please
disconnect, check your preferences, then go off and die. Do NOT type PIN until
requested. Please continue to hold, your call is important to us. Sharon’s
in charge of envelopes and she isn’t in on Fridays. You need to go to the
other till. Have you considered on-line banking? Eff Off, fat cow. If you would
like to speak to an assistant, please have your account details ready and call
back in two hundred years. People tell me, by the way, that it is possible to
get terribly rude service in France, and that I’ve just had a lot of unusually
nice experiences. Ho hum. I also hear from Americans that Britain is friendly
and ever so polite, to which I reply, “Surely America is friendly
and ever so polite (except at immigration)?” and they say, oh no, we’re
the rudest country on earth. In her book about the English, Kate Fox conducted
field experiments, such as bumping into people to see if they would say “Sorry”
– which 80 per cent of them duly did. She concluded that manners have not
declined, and that when we exclaim at the standards of courtesy on the roads,
we ought to remember what it’s like to drive in Italy. We still queue up
nicely, maintain a belief in fair play, and when we don’t like something,
we make an ironic joke about it (because we don’t like to make a scene).
And yet, if you ask people, they will mostly report with vehemence that the
world has become a ruder place. They are at breaking point. They feel like blokes
in films who just. Can’t. Take. Any. More. So what on earth is going on?
Reprinted from Talk to the Hand by Lynne Truss by permission of Gotham
Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Copyright © 2005by Miraculous
Panda Ltd. All rights reserved. This excerpt, or any parts thereof, may not
be reproduced without permission.
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