Word: behavior
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...those who find such reading burdensome, there are classes. Baldrige offers lectures and seminars for ill-mannered executives at banks, insurance companies and other protocol-minded firms. "Young managers," she says, "are simply not aware of the nuances of social behavior. It's appalling that young people graduating from Vassar, Harvard and Stanford don't know the meaning of an RSVP. They often don't show up when they're invited, or they show up with a date." To mend their ways, Baldrige charges a sobering $3,500 a lecture, $6,000 for a full...
...perilous, of course, for anyone less sagacious than Alexis de Tocqueville to make generalizations about American manners. Men and women often have wildly different ideas about what is courteous behavior; so do the young and the old, whites and blacks, smokers and nonsmokers. Regional differences are strong, and so are those between large cities and smaller ones. Despite a general decline in courtesy in recent decades, many Southerners pride themselves on having retained quite formal manners; New Yorkers, by contrast, take a perverse pride in their fellow citizens' rudeness...
...Such behavior, of course, can be interpreted as part of the antimanners of an elaborate antistyle. Not everyone is wearing a blue blazer and short hair. At the crowded Astor Place Haircutters, a few dozen blocks from the orchid-scented salon of Monsieur Marc, the walls are decorated with a cellophane-taped montage of punk haircuts: the teeth cut, the rainbow cut, the fungi cut, the oh, s&$151;-- cut ("We call it that," says Owner Enrico Vezzo, "because that's what the customer says when he looks in the mirror...
...disavow the slightly embarrassing equation of good manners and money. While Emily Post's original guide was full of such now esoteric information as what color livery the footmen should wear, Elizabeth Post insists that she and her grandmother-in-law both regard etiquette as "a code of behavior, based on kindness and consideration." Says Ann Landers: "Good manners are important because they show how you care about another person. Bad manners indicate a lack of caring." Marjabelle Stewart maintains that "manners will take you places money never could." All the etiquette books now talk of being friendly, kindhearted...
What Martin believes in-and her book on children encompasses the full range of adult behavior as well-is that "we are all born ignorant and oafish," and it is the duty of all parents to teach their younger selves how to behave properly. The only way to do so, she says, is by providing a good example plus tireless nagging. "It takes 18 years of constant work to get [a child] into presentable enough shape so that a college will take him or her off your hands," she announces. The child must be taught not just to say thank...