Today's Boston Globe has an interesting article on manners and etiquette. It's focused primarily on the decline of civility, and the notion that 9/11 introduced a sort of "grace period" wherein people did (briefly) treat each other with kindness and care.
''We can almost pinpoint the decline of manners and etiquette to the 1960s,'' says Thomas. ''Prior to that, families ate together at the dinner table. Manners were reinforced all the time -- conversation, listening skills, dining skills, basic considerations, and even electronic manners in that you didn't take telephone calls during the meal. But then people began not to eat together as much, and that's when the basics were no longer taught.Posted by rv at November 10, 2003 08:59 PM to news''One problem these days,'' she says, ''is that, unfortunately, there's a lapse in etiquette when people make too great a deal over things that are inadvertent, offenses that they perceive as being intentional but really are inadvertent oversights. In etiquette, we want to overlook as much as we can. Not everything, of course, but we try to give other people the benefit of the doubt.''