DEAR MISS MANNERS: How does one go about introducing a new eating utensil?
I have great problems eating pizza, onion soup and spaghetti neatly. What I need is a delicate pair of scissors, which would be called "cheese scissors." They could resemble the small scissors that hairdressers use. On the place setting, they could be placed to the right of the knife.
How can I go about making these scissors acceptable? Shall I just buy a pair and start using them?
It seems to me that discreetly cutting the cheese string would be much more lady-like than pulling a long string of cheese or wrapping it around my finger until it finally breaks. What do you think?
GENTLE READER: Great idea. You'll be a social pariah, of course, but at least you won't have strings of food hanging down your front.
Don't get Miss Manners wrong. The hostility will not come from silver snobs, who would be delighted to add another useful tool to our (ah, their) collections. The idea behind specialized tools is, naturally, to make life easier for the diner, not harder.
However, it is unfortunately true that there was a nasty time during the 19th century industrial revolution when guessing the uses of peculiar flatware served as an entrance test for moving up into the middle class.
This is no longer the case. The table has become simplified, to put it delicately -- possibly because so few people sit at it. But the sting of the old days has a peculiar afterlife. People still speak with mysterious pride of "not knowing which fork to use" as if nearly all those specialized Victorian pieces hadn't been melted down to finance World War I, and now they would be lucky to get a metal fork instead of a plastic one.
Those are the folks who may at first admire your originality and daring, but will turn on you if your idea catches on. They'll brood that you look down on them for not recognizing, using or owning the new tableware tool.
But at least you won't have cheese on your chin.
DEAR MISS MANNERS: It's that time of year again. My in-box gets cluttered with solicitations for donations payable to the young lady or young man that is graduating from high school, college, beauty school or the school of hard knocks.
These are children that I will most likely never meet, and I have had to cover the workload when their parents (my co-workers) missed work because said child was sick.
Why is this practice used? Am I right to be mortified that complete strangers solicit me for my hard-earned money?
GENTLE READER: Mortified? No.
If these really are solicitations, not just invitations that you interpret as such (in which case you owe nothing more than politely declining and wishing the graduate well), all you have to do is to throw them away. It is the parents who Miss Manners believes should be mortified that their children, whom they cannot throw away, are out begging.
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