OMG and LOL: Are manners making a comeback? Shelley Fralic, Vancouver Sun Published: Saturday, April 16, 2011 Much has been written of late about manners, and how the common civility that has long been the foundation upon which civilization is built has been eroded to the point where if a stranger stands up to give you a seat on the bus, you are not only grateful but startled at the anomaly of the gesture.
That's because we are in one of those ugly cultural dips in history, a time when rudeness rules and boors roam free, where communal media and freeranging self-importance has turned millions into foul-mouthed illiterate correspondents and social louts who equate freedom of speech with the death of decorum. The Internet is, without doubt, the universal leveller of modern language, an electronic cauldron that has distilled the modern parsing that once employed sentences with nouns and verbs and punctuation into a cryptic new shorthand. And as the language has devolved, so, too, have the standards of etiquette. discussing logarithms. Generation Y'ers attending etiquette classes in city. They text during job interviews.
They friend their bosses on Facebook. Many can’t cleanly cut their steaks. Millennials, it’s time to meet Miss Manners. Wide-eyed 20-somethings are inundating New York etiquette classes as they look for a lifeline in the transition between college slacker and Wall Street suit. Old (and new) fashioned manners are back. As those who regularly read my writing in this space know by now, I was raised by my grandmother, not my parents.
So in many ways I had a unique kind of childhood from my friends; one of the most significant differences was that I was expected to speak and comport myself around adults more formally, and meals were pretty structured. Though my grandma was a pretty energetic lady and not dowdy by any stretch of the imagination, she was also a bit of a throwback when it came to being clean and tidy (and on time) for meals, which usually started with real hors d'oeuvres, progressed through salad or soup, followed by a main course and ended with dessert (yes, we had pizza nights and BBQ too, but those were not regular treats).
I was expected sit and eat quietly at the table from age 4 and make polite conversation with everyone at the table as soon as I was able to; I could only leave the table if I asked to be excused. Oh, and if in doubt, refer to the Golden Rule. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 25 Manners Every Kid Should Know By Age 9.