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    作法
    I'm a fan of Miss Manners, so people sometimes assume I must be one of those people who seek out copies of old etiquette books; but I'm really not. To me, writers who lack her Lewis Carroll sense of mischief about human interaction are kind of dull, if improving in an anthropological sense.

    The anthropology itself can be fun, though. I wandered into the 1922 Emily Post on Bartleby a few days ago, and just about every chapter has some sort of surprise.

    There's the section on how a gentleman asks a lady to dance at a ball, which contains this paragraph:

    When a gentleman is introduced to a lady he says, "May I have some of this?" or "Would you care to dance?"


    I don't hang out at hetero clubs much anymore, most of my friends being safely paired off by now, but I'm pretty sure if a guy walks up to a woman in a dance place and says, "May I have some of this?" he'd better be staring directly at the plate of sliders parked next to her margarita if he doesn't want serious trouble.

    The language can be surprising, too. The association of diamonds with ice is pretty obvious and primal, but I wasn't aware people like Emily Post were throwing it around back then.

    In your jewelry let diamonds be conspicuous by their absence. Nothing is more vulgar than a display of "ice" on a man's shirt front, or on his fingers.


    It's also somehow comforting to know that elegant was being pretentiously overused even then:

    There are certain words which have been singled out and misused by the undiscriminating until their value is destroyed. Long ago "elegant" was turned from a word denoting the essence of refinement and beauty, into gaudy trumpery.


    Yes. It's really annoying that you can't actually use elegant to mean "simple and uncluttered" and expect people to know what you mean. A shame that that started so long ago.

    I'm not sure what to make of her chapter on traveling abroad. Perhaps at that point, Americans really were the only group that had a tendency toward coarsely loud merriment that wouldn't leave other travelers in peace and a high-handed attitude toward servitors. That crowd seems to have expanded since then, though, if my experience in Asia is any indication.
    Posted by Sean on 2009-02-14 11:32:17
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