DEAR MISS MANNERS: My husband's 87-year-old father, a patient in a nursing home under hospice care, has some dementia, but is lucid quite a bit of the time. We walked in on a conversation at the foot of his bed between my husband's younger sister, her husband and one of the staff nurses, who were discussing specific "timeframes" in full voice as to his life expectancy.

We were shocked! I gently tapped the nurse on the shoulder, as her back was toward me, and whispered, "Don't you think this should be discussed somewhere else?"

At that point, the brother-in-law said, again in full voice, "Oh, he knows."

Of course he "knows." Hospice has a compassionate and realistic approach when it comes to keeping patients apprised.

But we felt that this was an egregiously vulgar conversation to conduct within earshot of the patient.

My husband and I both began our college years in pre-med and later switched majors. In those days, we were always taught as a matter of dignity and respect to the patient to watch our conversations in the patient's presence. This universal dictum even applied to patients who were in a deep coma and hadn't responded to crude stimuli for years.

On a more mundane level, we feel this is a vulgar violation of everyday manners. This event has caused quite a rift in the family.

GENTLE READER: There is nothing petty about the etiquette involved -- and grossly violated -- in this situation. It addresses the fundamental principle upon which the entire noble field of manners is based: respect for human beings simply because they are human beings.

Yet, paradoxically, it suspends the usual advantage that manners have over morals, namely that if you don't get caught, it doesn't count.

The violation is flaunting the belief that the person is incapable of understanding how rudely he is being treated. Never mind whether your father-in-law was aware of this conversation or of his situation. What your relatives did was the equivalent of thumbing their noses at a blind person.

DEAR MISS MANNERS: I was invited to the homecoming dance by a friend of a friend who bought me a very lovely corsage for my wrist. While we were dancing another girl walked up to me and asked me if we were allowed to take the corsages off because they were falling off while we danced.

I told her I did not know. She took her corsage off but I left mine on. Is it proper to leave the corsage on all the time even if it's falling? Or is it all right to take it off? This has bothered me for a long time and I want to know what is right for the next time I receive another corsage.

GENTLE READER: Propriety is not so interested in the state of the flowers as in that of the gentleman who gave them to you. Miss Manners assures you that it would be better to let them wilt, rather than his feelings.

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Have fun at the prom, kids. You look amazing or hilarious, whichever it was that you intended. Please forgive Miss Manners if she can't always tell.

But you should not imagine that what you are wearing and doing represents formal dress and etiquette, even in the mild form in which these survive today. The formality occasionally practiced by people who do not confuse their blue jeans with their personalities, and are thus able to manage more than one style without getting sulky, goes by different rules.

Irreverence and discontinuity both contributed to fashioning the current American prom style. When proms resumed their importance in student society after a period in which they had been denigrated as too frivolous and conventional for the young, the cover story was that the revival was distinguished by irony. But satirists need a clear vision of their target, and the revivalists had only the haziest notion of how things had been done in earnest.

The result is what might be called Cartoon Plutocrat. This style has been depicted, almost without change, for three-quarters of a century, in both political humor and simple comic strips.

The male who embodies this wears a tailcoat, top hat and an assortment of odd clothing, mixing full evening dress with morning clothes. The female equivalent is festooned with long pearls over her tank-like bosom, a tiara and a lorgnette with which to look down on the world.

But this pair seems only to have an opera subscription together, where he goes for napping and she for frowning. The female with whom he indulges in other activities wears a tight-fitting black dress not quite covering her ample bosom, gloves up to her armpits and lots of sparkles at ear, throat and wrists (over the gloves).

Their drink is champagne, which has the curious property of projecting bubbles out of his head. Their transportation is a block-long car. He deals in cash, peeling bills from a fat roll; she deals just as frankly in goods, which she carries on her person.

Politically they are depicted as vicious exploiters of honest folk. In other contexts, they are merely foolish providers of merriment to sensible people.

If prom-goers find it funny to impersonate these figures, Miss Manners considers it harmless enough. You have only one senior prom, as the young plead when arranging the sponsorship of their whims.

The same cannot be said of weddings. Miss Manners does not mean to suggest that it is harmless to make such serious occasions amusing, nor that most people can expect to have only one (and perhaps there is a connection here). It is to rescue those who want dignified formality at their weddings that Miss Manners warns against confusing it with prom style.

True formality is to prom style as sport is to roughhousing: You can have as much fun and as much competition, but only if you play within the rules.

There are now two degrees of formality for evening and two for daytime. The most common evening dress, which should never see the light of day, is called "black tie." This means dinner jackets (the black suit for which the slangy term "tuxedo" has become common) with white shirts and black bowties for gentlemen and long dresses (narrow and sleeved for dinner parties, but rather more bare and pouffy for dances) for ladies. White tie involves a tailcoat, wing-collared shirt, white bowtie and white waistcoat for gentlemen, and even more effort on the part of ladies.

Morning dress, the most formal of daytime clothes, is a black (sometimes grey) cutaway worn with striped trousers, grey tie and waistcoat for gentlemen; the daytime equivalent to black tie is the black sack coat, or club coat, without tails, but also worn with grey waistcoat, striped pants and grey tie. Brides have special dispensation to wear long dresses, and other ladies wear short but dressy clothes and, if they really want to be correct and outrageous, hats.

To mix these elements, wearing evening clothes at an afternoon wedding, wrist watches and leather shoes with evening dresses, tailcoats with black tie, ladies' hats in the evening, odd colored ties and so on, is not amusing. But then weddings, unlike proms, are not supposed to be funny.

And to mix any of this up with throwing money around is to mistake vulgarity for manners. Etiquette has nothing to say about limousines, except what a peculiarly pretentious word that is for a car.

DEAR MISS MANNERS: What do you do when you are talking to a friend who just had a baby, and all of a sudden you cannot remember the child's gender, let alone the name?

I don't mind admitting that I've forgotten a name so much, but you can't even ask "What's his name?" without running the risk of being wrong about the child's gender. It's possible to get around this by addressing the baby and saying, "Well, what's YOUR name?" but I find it a bit cutesy to talk to an infant like that.

GENTLE READER: All newborn babies are cutesy by definition, and therefore may be correctly addressed as either Sweetie Pie or Honey Bunch.

Furthermore, they never leap out at you shouting, "I bet you don't remember who I am!" Miss Manners thinks it a shame that they so quickly outgrow this polite restraint.

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DEAR MISS MANNERS: Are there socially acceptable alternatives to expressing one's grief or sense of loss regarding the passing on of friends or relatives short of attending the wake or funeral? I guess what I am asking is if attending wakes and/or funerals is considered de rigueur?

For reasons even I do not understand, wakes and funerals cause me an undue amount of stress and anxiety. I don't handle them well at all and wonder if there are less stressful options for me when needing to convey my sense of loss regarding an acquaintance's passing.

GENTLE READER: Miss Manners understands your reasons for disliking funerals, because everyone else shares them. You are not a special, sensitive case.

Funerals focus on the horrible fact that someone connected to you is now gone, and the frightening fact that one day you, too, will die.

Nevertheless, it is no exaggeration to say that they are a defining element of civilization. We wouldn't think much of a society, no matter what its other achievements, that threw its deceased into a disposal like garbage. Funerals honor the dead, comfort the bereaved and give life a sense of meaning and continuity.

So get a grip on yourself and go. Yes, there are other ways of expressing grief and compassion -- writing condolence letters, sending flowers, paying calls on the bereaved, establishing memorials -- but these are additions rather than substitutes.

DEAR MISS MANNERS: What is the reason bread and butter is not served at formal dinners?

GENTLE READER: It will spoil your appetite, as your mother used to say before she lost the battle against eating between meals. Formal dinners are planned in advance and consist of at least four courses, so there is no need to appease the appetite while waiting for the first course to be served, as at restaurants, or to supplement a meal consisting chiefly of lettuce leaves, as at luncheon.

DEAR MISS MANNERS: I am a young person who has had the unfortunate privilege of having been made to be the unwilling confidante of more than one unpleasant older person at church. These people are not elderly or senile, which would make their actions tolerable, but are old enough to be my parents -- and even know my parents -- and would seem to know better.

The first time an attack happened, I was too surprised to say anything. The next time I had my guard down, it happened again.

How do I make sure that these conversational assaults never, ever happen again? If you could, please provide me with a few choice lines of defense, since total avoidance of these people is not yet an option.

GENTLE READER: You do not specify what sort of confidences these people are unloading on you, and Miss Manners is almost afraid to ask. In any case, however, your response should be a sympathetic, "I'm not really the right person to ask about that. I'm sure the pastor would be more of a help."

Oddly enough, this will work all the better if it is not quite relevant -- if they are telling, not asking, and indulging in petty meanness, rather than in more interesting sins.

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