13th May 2008
Etiquette and Society: Table Manners
My mother always chided us to practice our manners, even at home, because “Some day you might be invited to the White House, and you wouldn’t want to have bad table manners there!” While this may depend somewhat on whether you’re a particular fan of the President who invites you, it’s a valid enough point — we practice good table manners so we don’t look like uncivilized, disgusting pigs when we’re dining with other people. So far, the most I have been able to apply this to is business dinners, as it is a bad career move to eat like a slob (especially if you’re a working woman, your manners must be impeccable). I expect that the White House is rather far off in the future.
For today’s Etiquette Instruction, we return to the classroom film format which I love so well. Emily Post herself narrated this 1947 mental hygiene film called Table Manners.
Manners for the most formal dinner party are exactly the same as they are at home!
Translation: Emily Post is very formal at home.
This is a surprisingly high-level discussion of table manners, showing adults instead of children as its subject. I suspect the target audience was not in a classroom, even a high school one, but rather the film was made for showing at the Emily Post Institute itself. (Maybe they had etiquette classes or something. I can’t find much information on its history, and their website publishes various points of etiquette rather than a history of the Institute and its mission.)
But back to the film! I found it hilarious that there is advice on how to eat spaghetti. That’s probably the one meal that I would never imagine being served at a dinner party — maybe it was considered fancy in the 40’s! Finally, I learned that I don’t eat soup correctly (I tip the spoon towards me, not away) and have never done quite the right thing with soup spoons. Damn, ma, why didn’t you teach me that — now I’ll be the laughing stock of that White House dinner!
You have been moving the spoon away from yourself while eating soup for years. You started doing it specifically because you knew it was considered better manners, having gleaned this information from BBC costume dramas.
My response was that this was a purely manufactured piece of etiquette, whose only purpose is to distinguish those of the in-group from those of the out-group. Most table manners are overwrought versions of reasonable rules against certain forms of vulgarity, but this one is not. Unlike precedence, I can’t complain that this rule is intrinsically un-American, but it definitely rubs me the wrong way. People should be able to eat their soup either way without opprobrium, and unless you are eating with an extremist pedant, they are so able.