DEAR MISS MANNERS: My 17-year-old cousin is going to have her first child in two weeks. She is not married. Her immediate family consider themselves religious and, frankly, better than anyone else, so needless to say, this was quite an unpleasant surprise for them and for my grandmother.

The issue is that they haven't told anyone about the child and don't plan on telling our extended family, whom we are quite close to.

My immediate family thinks this is quite appalling. We consider the fact that they are keeping the pregnancy "hidden" out of shame to be shameful in itself, and think that our relatives will be more insulted when they are (if they are) introduced to a 6-month-old baby than if they were told of the expected child beforehand. We have been told that it is "not our place" to tell anyone, but we feel it is just plain rude to keep this hidden.

What is proper and less insulting? To announce the coming birth of a child, or to surprise them more with "Oh, you have a great nephew who turned 6-months-old today, didn't you know?"

GENTLE READER: The branches of your family may differ about religion, but they share an oddly unrealistic notion of censorship. To begin with, why do the prospective mother's wishes not seem to figure into the dispute? Unless she plans to hide the fact of the child's existence, through allowing him to be adopted or by rearing him where she is not known, she is the one who ought to be telling her other relatives.

It may not be your place to make the announcement, but Miss Manners hardly thinks it anyone else's place to clap an order of silence on you. You are honor-bound only to inform the silent grandparents that you cannot promise you will never mention your new cousin.

DEAR MISS MANNERS: My daughter was home educated and finished her classes last November. She was married in December. I did not send out a graduation announcement because I did not feel it was proper etiquette to send two invitations at once. I thought people might think we were being greedy.

Now that it is graduation time, I want to send a graduation announcement for her. I know that all graduates like receiving money for gifts, and so does my daughter. Besides, it would really be a blessing for her and her new husband.

How do I go about this properly? We are not going to have a graduation ceremony because it is too hard to accommodate my daughter's busy schedule. What I want to do is send a simple announcement that she did in fact complete her education and if anyone should want to send her a graduation gift that would be wonderful. Should I put her married name, though? At the time of completing her schooling she was not married. Should she be the one to announce her graduation, or should I still do this?

GENTLE READER: Greedy? Because it occurred to you that it might be profitable to announce an event from last year, surely long-since known to anyone who might care, even if your daughter is too busy to socialize with them? Who, besides Miss Manners, would be crass enough to think that?

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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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