Post-Martin 5 June 2003, 08:56

A gorgeous local used bookstore had a hefty copy of Miss Manners’ 1983 book, which I finished devouring a few weeks ago. Except for a few amusingly ambiguous lines about things like engraved invitations and bride’s trousseaux, most of her advice is still pertinent 20 years later.

There are a few choice nuggets of social history to be mined within this work, including the fact that napkin rings were intended to be individualized rather than identical, as their function was to mark each person’s cloth napkin so that it could be used during subsequent meals (not okay in Miss Manners’ book, as it were). And apparently knife-rests (crystal or otherwise) were de rigeur at the Russian table.

However, a few reader questions betray an antediluvian connotation. Two readers wrote in to Miss Manners on the etiquette of attracting a comely and/or well-heeled airplane seatmate/one-night stand. They implied that anyone could sit anywhere they wanted on the airplane. This boggles the mind, in the age of AIDS (which rushed upon us before the ink was dry on this second printing of the Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behaviour) and definitely does not compute post-September 11, 2001.

As most Americans don’t have passports and only fly domestic, perhaps at one time there was general seating on domestic flights. I know on good authority (David Lodge’s contemporaneous Small World) that seating in transatlantic and pan-European flights was assigned.

As Jackie Brown is my stewardess, I was gobsmacked.

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