Columnists
Manners 101
I had confidently predicted that the COVID-19 pandemic would be over by January 31, 2022. That’s because my wife and I bought tickets this past summer to see Emmylou Harris at the refurbished Massey Hall in Toronto on that date. Surely the gods of disease would arrange it so that we were clear of any risk of getting infected by then.
No such luck. With the new Omicron variant’s emergence, Covid has regained the upper hand. And that means our unnaturally anti-social, stay at home behaviour may continue for some time yet.
Which brings up the question: how will we cope with normalcy when it finally returns? Will we have forgotten our manners? Will what constitutes good manners have undergone a shift during the pandemic?
Good manners involve adherence to a set of generally accepted social norms. However, there is no public registry of these norms, so it’s left to each of us to make our own list. For this piece, I looked for a list someone else had prepared. I turned to our old friend the world wide web, and got one from wikihow.com.
The author of the article divides good manners into four categories—conversational, respect for others, table manners and online conduct. So we’ll stick with them.
With conversation, the trick is apparently to say “please” and. “thank you” after you ask for and receive assistance, regardless of how trivial the assistance may be; to introduce yourself by name when you are meeting someone for the first time, and to solicit and repeat the other person’s name in order to remember it for the life of the conversation; to listen to the other person without interruption and then to respond to demonstrate you have taken in what was said. Oh yes, and to avoid using bad language.
When it comes to respect for others, you should offer to help when you can, respect others’ personal spaces, congratulate them on their accomplishments rather than pointing out their failures, send copious thank-you notes, and don’t typecast people (such as by talking about their ethnicity, but deal with them as individuals (such as by asking about their personal experiences).
As for table manners, never bring your cell phone to the table, wait until everyone has been served before starting to eat, use the implements you been given in the order they are arranged, don’t reach for things but ask for them to be passed, don’t talk while eating and chew with your mouth closed, keep your elbows off the table, and excuse yourself if you have to leave the table, without going into the gory details.
When it comes to online antics, negative or offensive postings will surely come back to bite you, so don’t do it. Don’t post material about others without their permission, don’t oversell yourself, and don’t send people unsolicited material.
That’s just one person’s take on basic manners. But I think it reflects what most people would endorse it—even though it means I get a failing grade in the elbows on the table department My mother would have added deportment, grooming, hygiene and sartorial tags to those admonitions. I would have added some chivalrous gestures, such as giving up a seat in the bus to an elder, or opening the door to let a lady through first. But chivalry may have had its day.
On the hopeful front, I don’t’ think that what constitutes good manners will have been changed much by the pandemic, which means we should be able to pick up socially where we left off when the pandemic ends, albeit with a little rust. And who knows: maybe I’ll get lucky and it will in fact end by January 31—Emmylou Harris day.
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