Polite Society

This is an excerpt from an interview FT (http://www.ft.com/) had with Judith Martin, our very well known Miss Manners, published August 30/31, 2008.

"When Martin was covering embassies for the Post, she was bombarded and flattered by invitations. She complained to her husband that if she lost her job the next day, few of these people would invite her.

Martin's husband replied, "If he (the ambassador) lost his job tomorrow, you wouldn't go".

The conversation promted an epiphany: "We decided that the only people who would cross our threshold in our private life would be people we liked or thought we might like." "

.................."Expressing anger doesn’t usually change people’s behaviour. It just makes them rude back. You double the amount of rudeness in the world.” Her advice is more practical than prissy. “I have no magic formula (but) if you start screaming and yelling they write you off as someone who would never be pleased anyway.”

................“The English think we’re failed English people – that we don’t quite get it right, but that’s not the case,” she says. “The founding fathers of America very deliberately felt that manners in European court society with strict demarcations were not for us. De Toqueville points out that the chief thing about the servant-master relationship in America is that both know that their positions could be reversed tomorrow.”


From the Financial Times -
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/bb6a1862-755b-11dd-ab30-0000779fd18c.html?nclick_check=1