American - Author | September 13, 1938 -
Chaperons, even in their days of glory, were almost never able to enforce morality; what they did was to force immorality to be discreet. This is no small contribution.
Judith Martin
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Honesty has come to mean the privilege of insulting you to your face without expecting redress.
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If written directions alone would suffice, libraries wouldn't need to have the rest of the universities attached.
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We already know that anonymous letters are despicable. In etiquette, as well as in law, hiring a hit man to do the job does not relieve you of responsibility.
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You glance at an e-mail. You give more attention to a real letter.
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For email, the old postcard rule applies. Nobody else is supposed to read your postcards, but you'd be a fool if you wrote anything private on one.
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The mistake people keep making is that if they find a wonderful new tool, like email, they have to give up all others. They don't. You have simply added another very useful means to your communications repertoire.
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My children did not go through a stage of being rude to their parents. I'm sorry if that sounds incredible.
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I try to behave myself, and I succeed.
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First. I began my career as a copy girl. and the White House coverage, for example, was in the then-Women's section. So it was social coverage. It wasn't news, although we often got rather startling news out of it.
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I make a distinction between manners and etiquette - manners as the principles, which are eternal and universal, etiquette as the particular rules which are arbitrary and different in different times, different situations, different cultures.
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Over the last couple of decades, the personalization of the office changed dramatically... there's an informality people often take for the absence of rules - which it's not.
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