Talk to the Hand
Lynne Truss

Other people are quite dreadful. The only possible society is oneself. Oscar Wilde

An apology is a gesture through which an individual splits himself into two parts: the part that is guilty of the offence, and the part that dissociates itself from the delict and affirms a belief in the offended rule. Erving Goffman

Fuck off, Norway.

Paul Gascoigne, on being asked if he had a message for the people of Norway

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Author’s note

Introduction: When Push Comes to Shove

THE FIRST GOOD REASON Was That So Hard to Say?

THE SECOND GOOD REASON Why am I the One Doing This?

THE THIRD GOOD REASON My Bubble, My Rules

THE FOURTH GOOD REASON The Universal Eff-Off Reflex

THE FIFTH GOOD REASON Booing the Judges

THE SIXTH GOOD REASON Someone Else Will Clean It Up

Conclusion: Talk to the Hand

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise

By the same author:

Copyright

About the Publisher

Author’s note

The author apologises for the high incidence of the word “Eff” in this book. It is, sadly, unavoidable in a discussion of rudeness in modern life. Variants such as Effing, mother-Effing, and what the Eff? positively litter the text.

If you don’t Effing like it, you know what you can Effing do. (That’s a joke.)

Introduction: When Push Comes to Shove

If you want a short-cut to an alien culture these days, there is no quicker route than to look at a French phrase book. Not because the language is different, but because the first lesson you will find there usually takes place in a shop.

“Good morning, madam.”

“Good morning, sir.”

“How may I help you?”

“I would like some tomatoes/eggs/postage stamps please.”

“Of course. How many tomatoes/eggs/postage stamps would you like?”

“Seven/five/twelve, thank you.”

“That will be six/four/two Euros. Do you have the exact money?”

“I do.”

“Thank you, madam.”

“Thank you, sir. Good day!”

“Good day!”

Now the amazing thing is, this formal and civil exchange actually represents what happens in French shops. French shopkeepers really say good morning and goodbye; they answer questions; they wrap things ever so nicely; and when it’s all over, they wave you off like a near relation. There is none of the dumb, resentful shrugging we English shoppers have become so accustomed to. Imagine an English phrase book for French visitors, based on the same degree of verisimilitude – let’s call it “Dans le magasin”.

“Excuse me, do you work here?”

“What?”

“I said, excuse me, do you work here?”

“Not if I can help it, har, har, har.”

“Do you have any tomatoes/eggs/postage stamps?”

“Well, make your mind up, that’s my mobile.”

This book has quite a modest double aim: first, to mourn, without much mature perspective or academic rigour, the apparent collapse of civility in all areas of our dealings with strangers; then to locate a tiny flame of hope in the rubble and fan it madly with a big hat. Does this project have any value? Well, in many ways, no. None at all. First, it is hardly original or controversial to declare oneself against rudeness. (One is reminded of that famous objection to the “Women Against Rape” campaign: “Are there any women for rape?”) Secondly, it seems that an enormous amount of good stuff has been written on this subject already, and the plate has been licked pretty clean. Thirdly, and even more discouragingly, as long ago as 1971, the great sociologist Erving Goffman wrote that “concern about public life has heated up far beyond our capacity to throw light on it”. So, to sum up: it’s not worth saying; it’s already been said; and it’s impossible to say anything adequate in any case. This is the trouble with doing research.

However, just as my book on punctuation was fundamentally about finding oneself mysteriously at snapping point about something that seemed a tad trivial compared with war, famine, and the imminent overthrow of Western civilisation, so is Talk to the Hand. I just want to describe and analyse an automatic eruption of outrage and frustration that can at best cloud an otherwise lovely day, and at worst make you resolve to chuck yourself off the nearest bridge. You are lying in a dentist’s chair, for example, waiting quietly for an anaesthetic to “take”, and the dental nurse says, next to your left ear, “Anyway, I booked that flight and it had gone up forty quid.” At which the dentist says, in your right ear, “No! What, in two hours?” And you say, rather hotly, “Look, I’m not unconscious, you know”, and then they don’t say anything, but you know they are rolling their eyes at each other, and agreeing that you are certifiable or menopausal, or possibly both.

Whether it’s merely a question of advancing years bringing greater intolerance I don’t think I shall bother to establish. I will just say that, for my own part, I need hardly defend myself against any knee-jerk “grumpy old woman” accusations, being self-evidently so young and fresh and liberal and everything. It does, however, have to be admitted that the outrage reflex (“Oh, that’s so RUDE!”) presents itself in most people at just about the same time as their elbow skin starts to give out. Check your own elbow skin. If it snaps back into position after bending, you probably should not be reading this book. If, on the other hand, it just sits there in a puckered fashion, a bit rough and belligerent, then you can probably also name about twenty things, right now, off the top of your head, that drive you nuts: people who chat in the cinema; young people sauntering four-abreast on the pavement; waiters who say, “There you go” as they place your bowl of soup on the table; people not even attempting to lower their voices when they use the “Eff” word. People with young, flexible elbow skin spend less time defining themselves by things they don’t like. Warn a young person that “Each man becomes the thing he hates”, and he is likely to reply, quite cheerfully, that that’s OK, then, since the only thing he really hates is broccoli.

By contrast, I now can’t abide many, many things, and am actually always on the look-out for more things to find completely unacceptable. I find myself thinking that bringing back National Service for men between the ages of 15 and 35 might be an excellent thing. I also entertain pleasant fantasies about the compulsory culling of those who obstinately refuse to learn the rules of the apostrophe. Yet I still, amazingly, deny a rightward drift in my thinking. I merely ask, in all innocence: isn’t it odd, the way many nice, youngish liberal people are beginning secretly to admire the chewing-gum penalties of Singapore? Isn’t it odd, the way nice, youngish liberal people, when faced with a teenaged boy skateboarding in Marks & Spencer’s, feel a righteous urge to stick out a foot and send him somersaulting into the Per Una Section? I will admit that the mere thought of taking such direct and beautiful vengeance – “There he goes!” – fills me with a profound sort of joy.

Why is this not a handbook to good manners? Why will you not find rules about wielding knives and forks, using a mobile phone, and sending thank-you notes? I have several reasons for thinking that the era of the manners book has simply passed. First, what would be the authority of such a book, exactly? Why would anyone pay attention to it? This is an age of lazy moral relativism combined with aggressive social insolence, in which many people have been trained to distrust and reject all categorical answers, and even (I’ve noticed with alarm) to dispute points of actual law without having the shadow of a leg to stand on. However, this is not to say that manners are off the agenda in today’s rude world. Far from it. In fact, what is so interesting about our charming Eff-Off society is that perceived rudeness probably irritates rough, insolent people even more than it peeves polite, deferential ones. As the American writer Mark Caldwell points out in A Short History of Rudeness (1999), if you want to observe statusobsessed people who are exquisitely sensitive to slights, don’t read an Edith Wharton novel, visit San Quentin. Rudeness is a universal flashpoint. My main concern in writing this book is to work out why, all of a sudden, this is the case.

Another argument against laying down rules of etiquette is that we no longer equate posh behaviour with good behaviour, which is a splendid development, posh people being notoriously cruel to wildlife and apt to chuck bread rolls at each other when excited. Who wants to behave like a posh person? I know I don’t. I recently met a very posh person, the husband of (let’s say) a theatrical producer, and when I asked if he was himself in (let’s say) theatrical producing, he just said, “Oh God, no”, and refused to elaborate. Is this good manners? Well, the best you can say about it is that it’s very English, which is not the same. As the anthropologist Kate Fox points out in her fascinating Watching the English (2004), it is a point of honour in English society to effect all social introductions very, very badly. “One must appear self-conscious, ill-at-ease, stiff, awkward, and above all, embarrassed,” she writes. The handshake should be a confusion of half-gestures, apologies, and so on. And as for cheek-kissing, it is an established rule that someone will always have to say, “Oh, are we doing two?” Also essential in the introductory process, she says, is that on no account should you volunteer your own name or ask a direct question to establish the identity of the person you are speaking to.

I must admit that this last rule explained quite a lot to me. My standard behaviour at parties is to announce straight away who I am, and then work quite strenuously to ascertain the name and profession of the person I’m speaking to – mainly because I wish to avoid that familiar heart-stopping moment at the end of the evening when the host says, “So what did you make of my old friend the Archbishop of Canterbury, then? Looks good in mufti, doesn’t he? You seemed to be telling him off-colour jokes for hours.” However, it turns out that asking direct questions is socially naff, while the “Oh God, no” response is the one that is actually demanded by the compensatory instincts of good breeding. No wonder I have so often ended up playing Twenty Questions with chaps who seem to pride themselves on being Mister Clam the Mystery Man.

“So. Here we are at Tate Modern,” I say. “I’m afraid I didn’t catch your name. I expect you are front-page famous which will make this an embarrassing story to tell all my clued-up friends.”

“Oh no.”

“No?”

“Well, I’m known to a select few, I suppose. Mainly abroad. Nineteen.”

“Pardon?”

“You’ve got nineteen questions left. You’ve just used one.”

“Oh. Oh, I see. All right. Are you in the arts?”

“No, no. Nothing like that. Eighteen.”

“Are you animal, vegetable, or mineral, ha ha?”

“Mm. Like everybody, I believe, I’m mainly water. Seventeen.”

“I see. Well. Look. Are you the Archbishop of Canterbury?”

“No. Although there have been some notable clerics in the female line. Sixteen.”

“Do your bizarre trousers hold any clue to your profession?”

“How very original of you to draw attention to my bizarre trousers. Fifteen.”

“Do you own a famous stately home in the north of England?”

“Um, why do you ask?”

“Just a wild stab.”

“Well, I like your style, but no. Fourteen.”

“I give up. Who are you?”

“Not allowed. Thirteen.”

“All right. I was trying to avoid this. If I got someone strong to pin your arms back, where would I find your wallet?”

It’s always been this way, apparently, in so-called polite society. People go out and meet other people, but only so that they can come home again without anyone piercing the veil of their anonymity in the period in between. George Mikes made a related point in his wonderful How to be an Alien (1946): “The aim of introduction [in England] is to conceal a person’s identity. It is very important that you should not pronounce anybody’s name in a way that the other party may be able to catch it.”

Until recently, of course, people did aspire to posh manners. Hence the immense popularity, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in both Britain and America, of books that satisfied middle-class anxieties and aspirations – and incidentally fuelled snobbery. Books such as Letitia Baldridge’s Complete Guide to the New Manners for the ‘90s (referring to the 1890s) or the umpteen editions since 1922 of Emily Post’s Etiquette: The Blue Book of Social Usage existed because they were needed: as society became more fluid, people found themselves in unfamiliar situations, where there was a danger that they would embarrass themselves by punching the hotel porter for stealing their suitcase, or swigging from a fingerbowl, or using the wrong fork to scratch their noses. Cue the loud, general gasp of well-bred horror. Well, sod all that, quite frankly, and good riddance. Oldfashioned manners books have an implicit message: “People better than you know how to behave. Just follow these rules and with a bit of good luck your true origins may pass undetected.” It is no accident that the word “etiquette” derives from the same source as “ticket”. It is no accident, either, that adherence to “manners” has broken down just as money and celebrity have largely replaced birth as the measure of social status.

All of which leaves the etiquette book looking a bit daft. “Wait until the credits are rolling before standing up to leave,” I see in one recent guide to polite behaviour. “Don’t text when you’re with other people,” says another. “A thank-you letter is not obligatory, although one can be sent to the Lord Steward of the Royal Household.” I experience a great impatient hohum in the face of such advice. Once you leave behind such class concerns as how to balance the peas on the back of a fork, all the important rules surely boil down to one: remember you are with other people; show some consideration. A whole book telling you to do that would be a bit repetitive. However, I do recommend Debrett’s for its incidental Gosford Park delights. There is, for example, a good, dark little story in the most recent edition about a well-bred country gentleman with suicidal intent who felt it wasn’t right to shoot himself before entering his own name in the Game Book. You have to admire such dedication to form. For anyone wishing to follow his example, by the way, he listed himself under “Various”.

Manners never were enforceable, in any case. Indeed, for many philosophers, this is regarded as their chief value: that they are voluntary. In 1912, the jurist John Fletcher Moulton claimed in a landmark speech that the greatness of a nation resided not in its obedience to laws, but in its abiding by conventions that were not obligatory. “Obedience to the unenforceable” was the phrase that was picked up by other writers – and it leads us to the most important aspect of manners: their philosophical elusiveness. Is there a clear moral dimension to manners? Can you equate civility and virtue? My own answer would be yes, despite all the famous counter-examples of blood-stained dictators who had exquisite table manners and never used their mobile phone in a crowded train compartment to order mass executions. It seems to me that, just as the loss of punctuation signalled the vast and under-acknowledged problem of illiteracy, so the collapse of manners stands for a vast and under-acknowledged problem of social immorality. Manners are based on an ideal of empathy, of imagining the impact of one’s own actions on others. They involve doing something for the sake of other people that is not obligatory and attracts no reward. In the current climate of unrestrained solipsistic and aggressive self-interest, you can equate good manners not only with virtue but with positive heroism.

Philosophers are, of course, divided on all this – but then most of them didn’t live in the first years of the twenty-first century. Aristotle said that, if you want to be good, it’s not a bad idea to practise (I’m paraphrasing). In the seventeenth century, Thomas Hobbes said that the rights and wrongs of picking your teeth weren’t worthy of consideration (I’m paraphrasing again). In the 1760s, Immanuel Kant said that manners could not be reckoned as virtues, because they called for “no large measure of moral determination”; on the other hand, he thought they were a means of developing virtue. In November 2004, however, the philosopher Julian Baggini wrote in The Guardian, rather compellingly, that our current alarm at the state of manners derives from our belated understanding that, in rejecting old-fashioned niceties, we have lost a great deal more than we bargained for:

The problem is that we have failed to distinguish between pure etiquette, which is simply a matter of arbitrary social rules designed mainly to distinguish between insiders and outsiders; and what might grandly be called quotidian ethics: the morality of our small, everyday interactions with other people.

My small, personal reason for not writing a traditional etiquette book is not very laudable, but the phrase “a rod for one’s own back” is a bit of a clue to the way I’m thinking. If my experience as Queen of the Apostrophe has taught me anything, it has impressed on me that, were I to adopt “zero tolerance” as my approach to manners, I would never again be able to yawn, belch, or scratch my bottom without someone using it as watertight proof that I know not whereof I speak. Is it worth it? Zero Tolerance Manners Woman Ignores Person Who Knows Her Shock. “She walked straight past me,” said wounded friend of 25 years, who was recovering yesterday at home. “She is also rubbish at punctuation, if you ask me. You should see her emails.”

Plus, in all seriousness, there are many etiquette issues on which a zero tolerance position cannot be sensible. Take the everyday thorny problem of modern forms of address. I receive many letters which begin, “Dear Ms/Miss/Lynne Truss”, immediately followed by a heartfelt paragraph on the difficulty of addressing women whose marital status is unclear. Well, I sympathise with this difficulty, of course, and I am sorry to be the cause of it. I know there are many people who dislike being addressed without a title, so I appreciate that my correspondents are worthily trying to avoid being rude. However, as it happens, I loathe the whole business of titles, and prefer to do without one wherever possible, considering this a simple solution to an overelaborate problem. True, having ticked “Other” on a number of application forms, I now receive post bizarrely addressed to “Other Lynne Truss”, which is a bit unsettling for someone with a rocky sense of identity, but this is still better (in my view) than going along with this outmoded Miss/Ms/Mrs thing. My point is: there is no right and wrong in this situation. Who could possibly legislate?

We all draw the wavy contour line between polite and rude behaviour in a different place, much as we draw our own line in language usage. That’s why we are always so eager to share our experiences of rudeness and feel betrayed if our best friends say, “Ooh, I’m not sure I agree with you there; perhaps you’ve got this out of proportion.” In Eats, Shoots & Leaves, I alluded to Kingsley Amis’s useful selfexempting system of dividing the world into “berks” and “wankers”: berks being those who say, “But language has to change, surely? Why don’t we just drop that silly old apostrophe?”, and wankers being those who say, “I would have whole-heartedly agreed with you, Ms Truss, if you had not fatally undermined your authority by committing a howler of considerable dimensions quite early in the book, on page 19. I refer, of course, to the phrase ‘bow of elfin gold’. Were you to consult The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981), you would find in letter 236 that Professor Tolkien preferred the term ‘elven’ to ‘elfin’, but was persuaded by his editors to change it. Also, it was the dwarves who worked with gold, of course; not the elves. Finally, as any student of metallurgy would instantly confirm, gold is not a suitable element from which to fashion a bow, being at once too heavy and too malleable. With all good wishes, enjoyed your book immensely, keep up the good work, your fan.”

The idea of the Berk–Wanker system is that each of us feels safe from either imputation, because we have personally arrived at a position that is the fulcrum between the two. You may remember how the BBC always answered criticism years ago: “I think we’ve got the balance just about right.” Well, my point is: our attitude to manners is similarly self-defined and self-exonerating. Each of us has got it just about right. If there is something we are particularly good at, such as sending thank-you notes, we are likely to consider the thank-you note the greatest indicator of social virtue, and will be outraged by its breach. In an essay on press freedom in 1908, “Limericks and Counsels of Perfection”, G. K. Chesterton saw this subjective rule-making as sufficient reason in itself for not attempting to enforce manners:

We are justified in enforcing good morals, for they belong to all mankind…[but] we are not justified in enforcing good manners, for good manners always means our manners.

Basically, everyone else has bad manners; we have occasional bad moments. Everyone else is rude; we are sometimes a bit preoccupied.

So, if this book is not a guide to manners, what is it? And what are those six good reasons to stay home and bolt the door? Well, my only concern in this book is to define and analyse six areas in which our dealings with strangers seem to be getting more unpleasant and inhuman, day by day. It seemed to me, as I thought about the problem of rudeness, that it might be useful to break it down. Manners have so many aspects – behavioural, psychological, political, moral – yet we react to rudeness as if it is just one thing. Understanding things sometimes helps to defuse them. Maybe I will save the world from philistinism and yobbery with my six good reasons. Failing that, however, I have the small, related hope that I may at least save myself from going nuts.

1 Was That So Hard to Say?

“What ever happened to thank you?” we mutter. Ask anyone about the escalation of rudeness, and their first example is likely to be a quite animated description of how they allowed another car to pass last Wednesday, and received no thanks or acknowledgement; not even an infinitesimal nod accompanied by a briefly extended index finger, which is (curiously) usually good enough for most of us.

What has happened to the rituals of what Goffman called “supportive interchange”? They have gone disastrously awry, that’s what. Last year I was a passenger in another woman’s car in Denver, Colorado. Waiting at a junction, we received a wave from two young men in a car alongside. I smiled back, and then asked my companion whether the chaps might want something. She opened my window and called across, “Can I help you?” At which the driver of the other car stopped smiling and yelled, “What do you mean, can I help you? I was only being Effing friendly! Why don’t you get back to your Cherry Creek Country Club, you rich bitches!” and drove off. Of course, we were both taken aback. My companion, interestingly, was upset most by the insulting accusation of wealth. It annoyed her very much to be called a rich bitch. For my own part, however, I just kept thinking, “But surely a simple ‘No, thank you’ would have sufficed? What was wrong with ‘No, thank you’ in that situation?”

There is a theory of manners that uses the fiscal image of balancing the books, and I consider it a good one to begin with. For every good deed there is a proportionate acknowledgement which precisely repays the giver; in this world of imaginary expenditure and income, the aim is to emerge from each transaction with no one in the red. This involves quite a lot of sophisticated mental micro-calculation and fine moral balancing, so it’s small wonder that many people now find that they simply can’t be arsed. Nowadays, you open a door for somebody and instead of saying, “Thank you”, they just think, “Oh good” and go through it. This can be very annoying if you are standing there expectantly with your pen poised and your manners ledger open at the right page. All you can enter in the credit columns is flower doodles, and these in no way salve your shock and disappointment.

Why are people adhering less to the Ps and Qs? Where does that leave those of us who wince every day at the unspoken “thank you” or the unthought-of “sorry”? Is there a strategy for cancelling the debt? Should we abandon our expectations of reciprocity? And isn’t it confusing that our biggest experience of formal politeness comes from the recorded voices on automated switchboards – who patently don’t mean it? “We are sorry we cannot connect you at this time,” says the voice. But does it sound sorry? No, it doesn’t. It is just saying the politeness words in as many different combinations as it can think of. “Please hold. Thank you for holding. We are sorry you are having to hold. We are sorry to say please. Excuse us for saying sorry. We are sorry to say thank you. Sorry, please, thank you. Thank you, sorry, please.” An interesting rule applies here, I find: the more polite these messages, the more apoplectic and immoderate you become, as you lose twenty-five minutes from your life that could have been spent, more entertainingly, disinfecting the S-bend. “Thank you for choosing to wait for an adviser,” says the voice. “Choose?” you yell back. “I didn’t Effing choose this! Don’t tell me what I Effing chose!”

2 Why am I the One Doing This?

This is quite a new source of irritation, but it goes deep. As I noted in Eats, Shoots & Leaves, good punctuation is analogous to good manners. The writer who neglects spelling and punctuation is quite arrogantly dumping a lot of avoidable work onto the reader, who deserves to be treated with more respect. I remember, some years ago, working alongside a woman who would wearily scribble phone messages on a pad, and then claim afterwards not to be able to read her own handwriting. “What does that say?” she would ask, rather unreasonably, pushing the pad at me. She was quite serious: it wasn’t a joke. I would peer at the spidery scrawl, making out occasional words. “Oh, you’re a big help,” she would say, finally chucking the whole thing at me. “I’m going out for a smoke.” This was an unacceptable transfer of effort, in my opinion. I spotted this at the time, and have continued to spot it. In my opinion, there is a lot of it about.

Just as the rise of the internet sealed the doom of grammar, so modern communications technology contributes to the end of manners. Wherever you turn for help, you find yourself on your own. Say you phone a company to ask a question and are blocked by that Effing automatic switchboard. What happens? Well, suddenly you have quite a lot of work to do. There is an unacceptable transfer of effort. In the past, you would tell an operator, “I’m calling because you’ve sent my bill to the wrong address three times”, and the operator, who (and this is significant) worked for this company, would attempt to put you through to the right person. In the age of the automated switchboard, however, we are all coopted employees of every single company we come into contact with. “Why am I the one doing this?” we ask ourselves, twenty times a day. It is the general wail of modern life, and it can only get worse. “Why not try our self-check-in service?” they say, brightly. “Have you considered on-line banking?” “Ever fancied doing you own dental work?” “DIY funerals: the modern way.”

People who object to automated switchboards are generally dismissed as grumpy old technophobes, of course. But to me it seems plain that modern customer relations are just rude, because switchboards manifestly don’t attempt to meet you half-way. Manners are about imagination, ultimately. They are about imagining being the other person. These systems force us to navigate ourselves into channels that are plainly for someone else’s convenience, not ours. And they then have the nerve, incidentally, to dress this up as a kind of consumer freedom. “Now you can do all this yourself!” is the message. “Take the reins. Run the show. Enjoy the shallow illusion of choice and autonomy. And by the way, don’t bother trying to by-pass this system, buddy, because it’s a hell of a lot smarter than you are.”

This “do-it-yourself” tactic occurs so frequently, in all parts of life, that it has become unremarkable. In all our encounters with businesses and shops, we now half expect to be treated not as customers, but as system trainees who haven’t quite got the hang of it yet. “We can’t deal with your complaint today because Sharon only comes in on Tuesdays,” they say. “Right-oh,” you say. “I’ll remember that for next time.” In a large store, you will be trained in departmental demarcations, so that if you are buying a towel, you have to queue at a different counter – although there is no way you could discover this without queuing at the wrong counter first. Nothing is designed to put the customer’s requirements above those of the shop. The other day, in a chemist’s on Tottenham Court Road, the pharmacist accidentally short-changed me by £1, and then, with sincere apologies, said I would have to wait until he served his next customer (whenever that might be), because he didn’t have a password for the till. While we were discussing the likelihood of another customer ever happening along, another till was opened, a few yards away. I asked if he could get me my change from the other till, and he said, with a look of panic, “Oh no, it has to come from this one.” Now, this was not some callow, under-educated youth. This was a trained pharmacist; a chap with a brain. I suggested that he could repay the other till later – and it was as though I had explained the theory of relativity. He was actually excited by such a clever solution, which would never have occurred to him. Lateral thinking on behalf of the customer’s convenience simply wasn’t part of his job.

3 My Bubble, My Rules

This is the issue of “personal space”, about which we are growing increasingly touchy. One of the great principles of manners, especially in Britain, is respecting someone else’s right to be left alone, unmolested, undisturbed. The sociolinguists P. Brown and S. C. Levinson, in their book Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage (1987), coined the useful term “negative politeness” for this. The British are known to take this principle to extremes, because it chimes with our natural reticence and social awkwardness, and we are therefore simply outraged when other people don’t distinguish sufficiently between public and private space. The advent of the mobile phone was a disaster for fans of negative politeness. We are forced to listen, openmouthed, to other people’s intimate conversations, property transactions, business arrangements, and even criminal deals. We dream up revenges, and fantasise about pitching phones out of the window of a moving train. Meanwhile, legislation on smoking in public places has skewed our expectations of negative politeness, so that if a person now lights a cigarette in our presence anywhere, we cough and gag and mutter, and furiously fan the air in front of our faces.

There is an episode of The Simpsons in which Bart has a contagious mosquito bite, and is encased in an isolation bubble, and when he is told off for slurping his soup, invokes the memorable constitutional right: “Hey, my bubble, my rules.” Increasingly, we are all in our own virtual bubbles when we are out in public, whether we are texting, listening to iPods, reading, or just staring dangerously at other people. Concomitantly, and even more alarmingly, our real private spaces (our homes; even our brains) have become encased in a larger bubble that we can’t escape: a communications network which respects no boundaries. Our computers are fair game for other computers to communicate with at all times. Meanwhile, people call us at home to sell us things, whatever the time of day. I had a call recently from a London department store at 8pm to arrange a delivery, and when I objected to the hour, the reply was, “Well, we’re here until nine.” There is no escape. In a Miami hotel room last year, I retrieved the message flashing on my phone, and found that it was from a cold caller. I was incensed. Someone in reception was trying to sell me a time share. In my hotel room! No wonder people are becoming so self-important, solipsistic, and rude. It used to be just CIA agents with ear-pieces who walked round with preoccupied, faraway expressions, and consequently regarded all the little people as irrelevant scum. Now, understandably, it’s nearly everybody.

4 The Universal Eff-Off Reflex

It ought to be clear by now that manners fulfil a number of roles in social life. Arguably, their chief role is to make us feel safe in the company of strangers. In his book The English (1998) Jeremy Paxman says that manners seem to have been developed by the English “to protect themselves from themselves”; there is an attractive theory that, back in the mists of time, language evolved in humans simply as a less ghastly alternative to picking fleas off each other. We placate with good manners, especially when we apologise. Erving Goffman, in his Relations in Public (1971), wrote that an apology is a gesture through which an individual splits himself into two parts: the part that is guilty of the offence, and the part that dissociates itself from the crime and says, “I know why this was considered wrong. In fact, I think it’s wrong myself.” Goffman also explains what is going on when a person tells off a naughty child or dog in public: he is signalling to other people that while he loves the child/dog, he is also responsible for the child/dog, and since he clearly shares the general view of how the child/dog has just behaved, the matter is in hand and everyone can calm down.

Increasingly, it seems, this splitting does not occur – and to those who expect this traditional nod towards shared standards, the new behaviour can be profoundly scary. Point out bad manners to anyone younger than thirty-five, and you risk a lash-back reflex response of shocking disproportion. “Excuse me, I think your child dropped this sweet wrapper.” “Why don’t you Eff Off, you fat cow,” comes the automatic reply. A man on a London bus recently told off a gang of boys, and was set on fire. Another was stabbed to death when he objected to someone throwing food at his girlfriend. How many of us dare to cry, “Get off that skateboard, you hooligan!” in such a moral climate? In the old days, when the splitting occurred, a person would apply a bit of moral honesty to a situation and admit that he deserved to be told off. Not any more. Criticism is treated (and reacted to) as simple aggression. And this is very frightening. As Stephen L. Carter points out in his book Civility (1998), people now think that “I have a right to do X” is equal to “I am beyond censure when I do X.” The comedian Jack Dee tells the true story of a health visitor friend who was appalled to find a quite large child still suckling from his mother. “I wonder whether we should be putting a stop to this?” she said. At which, the boy detached himself from the breast, told her to Eff Off, and then went back to his dinner.

One hesitates to blame television for all this because that’s such an obvious thing to do. But, come on. Just because it’s obvious doesn’t mean it’s not true. Popular culture is fully implicated in the all-out plummeting of social standards. Abuse is the currency of all reality shows. People being vulgar and rude to each other in contrived, stressful situations is TV’s bread and butter. Meanwhile the encouragement of competitive, material self-interest is virtually its only other theme. The message and content of a vast amount of popular television can be summed up in the words, “And you can Eff right Off, too.” No wonder people’s aspirations are getting so limited, and their attitude to other people so cavalier. I got in a taxi recently and the driver said, “Do you know what I’d do if I had a lot of money?” I thought, well, take a holiday, buy a smallholding, give it to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds? He said, “I’d crash the car through the wall of that pub, drive right up to the bar, wind down the window and say, ‘Mine’s a pint, landlord, and you can Eff Off if you don’t like it coz I’m buying the place.’”

5 Booing the Judges

The timing was significant. Emerging, bruised and a bit horrified, from encounters with the uppity British public in the 2005 election campaign, the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, launched a campaign for the restoration of “respect”. “A bit late,” some of us muttered, when we heard. Respect was surely already a huge area for public concern. The humblest lip-reading TV viewer can spot a labio-dental fricative (or “F”) being formed on the lips of a footballer, with the result that when a permanently livid chap such as Wayne Rooney, with his veins sticking out on his neck, and his jug-ears burning with indignation, hurls seventeen assorted labio-dental fricatives at the referee, there is no interpreting this as, “Actually, it was a bit of a dive, sir, but now I’ve learned my lesson and I shan’t be doing it again.” Sport is supposed to be character-forming, but people are turning out like Wayne Rooney, and we are in deep trouble. Blaming the parents is an attractive option here, by the way. In 2002, the American research unit Public Agenda published Aggravating Circumstances: A Status Report on Rudeness in America, in which only 9 per cent of those questioned thought that children behaved respectfully towards adults, and 71 per cent reported seeing parents at sports events “screaming” at coaches, referees, and players.

Disrespect for older people; disrespect for professional people; disrespect for property – every day we are newly shocked at the prevalence of this kind of rudeness. Egalitarianism was a noble aim, as was enlightened parenting, but both have ploughed up a lot of worms. Authority is largely perceived as a kind of personal insult which must be challenged. On TV competitions, judges are booed and abused for saying, “Look, I’m sorry, he can’t dance!”, because it has become a modern tenet that success should have only a loose connection with merit, and that when “the people” speak, they are incontestably right. Meanwhile, old people are addressed by their first names, teachers are brusquely informed, “That’s none of your business!” by small children, judges are abused in court by mouthy teenagers, and it turns out that even if you’ve got the exact money, you can’t buy this jumper because Jason’s got the key to the till and he’s a muppet, he’s out the back at the moment, texting his girlfriend who’s just come back from Rhodes which was all right but she wouldn’t go again, she’s more of a Spain person, if you know what I mean, I like Spain, I’ve been there twelve times, but then I’m a bit of an iconoclast.

The most extreme form of non-deference, of course, is to be treated as actually absent or invisible. People talk across you on planes, or chat between themselves when they are serving customers. Nothing – nothing – makes me more angry than this. I get sarcastic. I wave in people’s faces. I say aloud, “I’m sure I’m standing here. Can you see me standing here? Why don’t you just catch my eye for a second to acknowledge that I am standing here?” For some time now, I have been carrying a Sooty glove-puppet on shopping expeditions, so that I can at least have a decent conversation when buying stuff in Ryman’s. “What’s that, Sooty? That will be £3.99? What’s that, Sooty? Thank you very much? What’s that, Sooty? Goodbye?”

6 Someone Else Will Clean It Up

Of all forms of rudeness, the hardest for a lot of people to understand is the offence against everybody. The once-prevalent idea that, as individuals, we have a relationship with something bigger than ourselves, or bigger than our immediate circle, has become virtually obsolete. For this reason, many people simply cannot see why they shouldn’t chuck their empty burger box out of the car window. They also don’t see any reason to abide by traffic laws unless there is a speed camera advertised. “That’s so selfish!” is a cry that has no judgemental content for such people, and little other meaning either. Yes, we have come a long way from Benjamin Rush, in 1786, writing, “Let our pupil be taught that he does not belong to himself, but that he is public property.” These days, of course, the child is taught to believe quite the opposite: that public property, in the natural way of things, belongs to him.

The interesting thing is that, cut free from any sense of community, we are miserable and lonely as well as rude. This is an age of social autism, in which people just can’t see the value of imagining their impact on others, and in which responsibility is always conveniently laid at other people’s doors. People are trapped in a kind of blind, brute state of materialism. “There is no such thing as society,” Mrs Thatcher said. Well, there certainly isn’t now. The latest Keep Britain Tidy campaign has thrown up an interesting moral puzzler for traditionalists by targeting the obvious self-interest of teenage litterers. It trades on – well, what else? Oral sex. Ingenious, or what? “While you’re down there…” runs the slogan, over the sort of come-and-get-it-big-boy pictures you normally see on little cards in phone booths before they are removed by the police. The idea is that, while you’re down there, you will also place empty beer cans in the bins provided.

I have to report that my reaction to the “While you’re down there…” posters is, to say the least, mixed. I am actually revolted by their cynicism, disgusted by the explicitness, concerned that teenage promiscuity might be a high price to pay for less litter, but on the other hand relieved and pleased that, in a poster aimed at young people, the ellipsis has been used correctly and that there is an apostrophe in the “you’re”. In other words, it actually could have been worse.

This book is, obviously, a big, systematic moan about modern life. And the expression “Talk to the hand” sort of yokes it all together. “Talk to the hand” specifically alludes to a response of staggering rudeness best known from The Jerry Springer Show – “Talk to the hand, coz the face ain’t listening”, accompanied by an aggressive palm held out at arm’s length. I chose it for the title because it’s the way I’ve started to see the world. Nearly sixty years ago, George Orwell wrote in Nineteen Eighty-Four that the future was a boot stamping on a human face for ever. I see it as a forest of belligerent and dismissive palms held up to the human face instead. Thank you for choosing to hold for an assistant. There’s no one here to help you at this time. Nobody asked you to hold the Effing door open. An error of type 506 has occurred. Please disconnect, check your preferences, then go off and die. Do NOT type PIN until requested. Please continue to hold, your call is important to us. Sharon’s in charge of envelopes and she isn’t in on Fridays. You need to go to the other till. Have you considered on-line banking? Eff Off, fat cow. If you would like to speak to an assistant, please have your account details ready and call back in 200 years.

People tell me, by the way, that it is possible to get terribly rude service in France, and that I’ve just had a lot of unusually nice experiences. Ho hum. I also hear from Americans that Britain is friendly and ever so polite, to which I reply, “Surely America is friendly and ever so polite (except at immigration)?” and they say, oh no, we’re the rudest country on earth. In her book about the English, Kate Fox conducted field experiments, such as bumping into people to see if they would say “Sorry” – which 80 per cent of them duly did. She concluded that manners have not declined, and that when we exclaim at the standards of courtesy on the roads, we ought to remember what it’s like to drive in Italy. We still queue up nicely, maintain a belief in fair play, and when we don’t like something, we make an ironic joke about it (because we don’t like to make a scene). And yet, if you ask people, they will mostly report with vehemence that the world has become a ruder place. They are at breaking point. They feel like blokes in films who just. Can’t. Take. Any. More. So what on earth is going on?

THE FIRST GOOD REASON Was That So Hard to Say?

The trouble with traditional good manners, as any fool knows, is judging where to draw the line. Politeness is, after all, a ritual of tennis-like exchange and reciprocity, of back-and-forth pick and pock, and unfortunately there is rarely an umpire on hand to stop play when the tie-break has been going on for four hours already and it’s got so dark you can no longer see the net. “Thank you,” says one polite person to another.

“No, thank YOU,” comes the response.

“No, thank YOU.”

“No, really, the gratitude is all mine.”

“Look, take it, you swine.”

“No, please: I insist.”

“After you, I said.”

“No, please: after YOU.”

“Look, I said after you, fatso.”

“No, please, after you.”

“After YOU.”

“After YOU.”

Did they ever discover perpetual motion in physics? In manners, it has been around for aeons. In 1966, Evelyn Waugh famously issued a warning to Lady Mosley that, if she wrote to him, she would always receive an answer. “My father spent the last twenty years of his life answering letters,” he wrote. “If someone thanked him for a wedding present, he thanked them for thanking him, and there was no end to the exchange but death.”

But although it can get out of hand, the principle of civil reciprocity is a solid one, for which reason it is an occasion for total, staggering dismay that it appears to be on its way out. The air hums with unspoken courtesy words, these days. You hold a door open for someone and he just walks through it. You let a car join traffic, and its driver fails to wave. People who want you to move your bag from a seat just stare at you until you move it; or sometimes they sit on it, to make the point more forcibly. As for the demise of “please”, you may overhear a child demanding in a supermarket at the top of its voice, “I want THAT ONE!” Hope briefly flares when the harassed mother bellows back, “You want that one, WHAT?” But you might have known how this would turn out. “I want that one, YOU EFFING BITCH!” shouts the kid in response.

Please, thank you, excuse me, sorry – little words, but how much they mean. Last week, a young woman sitting opposite me on a train picked up my discarded Guardian and just started reading it, and I realised afterwards that, had I wanted to do something similar, I would have used the maximum of politeness words (“Excuse me, sorry, may I? Thank you”) instead of none at all. The near extinction of the word “sorry” is a large subject we will treat elsewhere, but it seems appropriate to repeat here the story of the Independent’s Janet Street-Porter, who, while filming a documentary about modern education last year, tried to prompt the children at a school assembly to grasp the importance of apology. “Children,” she said, “in every family home, there’s a word which people find it really hard to say to each other. It ends in ‘y’. Can anyone tell me what it is?” There was a pause while everyone racked their brains, and then someone called out, “Buggery?”

As this book progresses, we will be dealing with sources of true, eye-watering horror and alienation, but the decline of courtesy words seems a good, gentle place to start because the saying of such words appears quite a simple matter. Unfortunately, however, it is not quite as simple as it looks. Besides being the sine qua non of good manners, what do these words really do? Well, they are a ritual necessary to life’s transactions, and also magic passwords, guaranteed to earn us other people’s good opinion and smooth the path to our own desires. Politeness is itself a complicated matter. When it works, does it draw people comfortably together, or does it actually keep them safely apart? And what of its moral content? Surely if we hold doors open, we are acting altruistically? Yet our furious, outraged, jumping-up-and-down reaction when we are not thanked would indicate that we hold doors open principally to procure the reward of a public pat on the back. Why is it so important to us that everyone should affirm a belief in the same codes of behaviour? Why is it so scary when someone doesn’t? Should we get out more? Or is going out the problem, and we should actually stay in?

Any study of the history of the subject of manners begins with Norbert Elias’s pioneering work The Civilizing Process, which began life as two volumes, The History of Manners and State Formation and Civilization, in 1939. It is not, sadly, the easiest of books to read, and I have gone quite pale and cross-eyed in the attempt, but it famously includes a section on the advance of etiquette in the early modern period which has been plundered by historians of society ever since it was first translated into English in the 1960s. Taking such etiquette issues as urinating, nose-blowing and spitting, Elias traces the norms for these activities in western Europe over several hundred years. For example, in the Middle Ages, “Do not spit into the bowl when washing your hands” becomes, by the time of Erasmus’ De civilitate morum puerilium (On Good Manners for Boys) in 1530, “Turn away when spitting, lest your saliva fall on someone…It is unmannerly to suck back saliva.” By 1714, we find in a French manual the excellent advice: don’t spit such a great distance that you have to hunt for the saliva to put your foot on it.

Obviously, a modern person is hoping, sooner or later, for the plain injunction, “Look, just stop spitting! What is it with all this spitting?” – but that’s quite a long time coming. For hundreds of years, people were advised that saliva (not phlegm, which is odd) was better out than in, and that placing your foot over your own little pool of spittle marked you out as a toff with finer feelings. What a relief when, at last (in 1774), it becomes the mark of a gent not to spit on the walls or the furniture. Only in 1859, however, does a book called The Habits of Good Society flip the whole subject to a modern perspective. You might even say that it overturns expectorations (ho ho). “Spitting is at all times a disgusting habit…Besides being coarse and atrocious, it is very bad for the health.”

Of course, it’s no surprise that over a period of hundreds of years standards of behaviour should change and (from the perspective of a modern sensibility) improve. But some less obvious, and very intriguing, points arise from even a cross-eyed and incompetent reading of The Civilizing Process, because it’s not just about people gradually doing fewer revolting things in public. It deals also with two related shifts: in politics, the inexorable centralising of power; and in society, the flattening and broadening of social differentiations (“diminishing contrasts, increasing varieties”). Not being a sociologist or historian, I am on very thin ice here, but I think I can see why manners might have risen in importance over a period marked by that kind of change. After all, the individual is subject to two opposing tides here, both pulling his feet from under him. When traditional class and power structures break down, people are apt to study each other feverishly for clues, and attach all kinds of judgement to forms of behaviour. Somewhere in the course of this paragraph, by the way, I let go of Norbert and struck out on my own. I couldn’t even tell you where it happened.

However, what Elias does argue is that, working outwards from a courtly nucleus, standards of behaviour developed under the influence of two evolving “fears”: shame and repugnance. It seems that once the rigidities of feudal society have given way to complex and diverse social networks, the Freudian super-ego inside each one of us becomes responsible for us having manners. Thus, the individual judges his own actions against a standard set by his own super-ego, and feels shame; he judges other people’s actions against the same super-ego, and feels repugnance. W. B. Yeats once said that we make rhetoric out of the quarrels with others, but poetry out of the quarrels with ourselves. What Elias sees in the history of manners is a similarly creative internal wrestling match between a person’s natural savagery and his own psychological organ of selfrestraint:

A major part of the tensions which were earlier discharged directly in conflicts with other people must be resolved as an inner tension in the struggle of the individual with himself…In a sense, the danger zone now passes through the self of every individual.

I promise this is the most boring part of this book (I certainly hope it is). But I feel it’s important to establish that reeling in horror at other people’s everyday impoliteness may just go with the territory of being civilised. Concern over the collapse of public behaviour is not a minor niggling thing. Nor is it new. The manners books quoted by Elias unwittingly tell two stories at once: their very existence proves that concern over the state of manners has followed the same upward graph, over time, as the civilizing process itself. If one takes the view that modern-day manners are superior to the cheerful spit-and-stamp of olden times, a paradox begins to emerge: while standards have been set ever higher, people have become all the more concerned that standards are actually dropping. Basically, people have been complaining about the state of manners since at least the fifteenth century. The discomfiting behaviour of others is one of humanity’s largest preoccupations, and is incidentally the basis of quite a lot of literature. Blame the damn super-ego. If we feel doomed and miserable when we consider the rudeness of our world, we are not the first to feel this way, and we certainly won’t be the last.

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