DEAR MISS MANNERS: I have a quick question regarding when an engagement ring should be worn and who should be wearing it. I have struggled with my fiance and this issue for about a year. I need help.

GENTLE READER: What do you mean, a quick question? Miss Manners will be pondering for days what on Earth it is that you and your fiance are quarreling about. Is he not handing over a ring, and is it because he doesn't want to buy one or because he wants to wear it himself?

An engagement ring is worn by a lady who is engaged, although it is perfectly respectable to be engaged without one; she may wear it ever after if the engagement leads to marriage.

DEAR MISS MANNERS: I was invited by friends to spend a day boating on a local river. It turned out to be a sunny, clear and quite humid day, and as we were on an open-console boat, there was no cover under which to take refuge from those overpowering rays. I was wearing shorts, a T-shirt, and sunglasses, but the heat still overtook me and I grew quite concerned that I would become sick. We had not planned on swimming and did not have bathing suits.

I politely suggested we return to land where I might find some air conditioning. My friends suggested that, instead, I remove my shorts and T-shirt and sit or swim in my undergarments since "they look just like a bathing suit."

My undergarments may be modest but they are, well, undergarments and not a bathing suit. In fact, my actual bathing suit is also modest and looks nothing like my undergarments.

Not only that, but I was the only single person on board; everyone else was part of a couple. I didn't think it appropriate for me to expose my undergarments, particularly around the men. I said nothing about my true feelings -- I was actually horrified -- but I did decline the suggestion.

Everyone onboard began to chide me for being "so tight and prudish." It didn't matter how many times I said I was uncomfortable removing my clothes, the teasing continued until we finally reached dry land.

It's certainly rude, but is it not also a bit strange that a party of people was encouraging a woman to remove her clothes? No one else seemed interested in doing the same. If they were interested, I still would not have done it. Because of this incident I have severely limited my time with these people, but my roommate says that I'm overreacting.

GENTLE READER: One cannot help reacting to the discovery that friends are indifferent to one's welfare. Miss Manners was willing to believe that yours were only concerned with your physical welfare (somewhat mixed with a reluctance to dock) when they made the suggestion. But when they began to taunt you, it suggested a less wholesome motive that you, with the advantage of knowing them, may have good reason to suspect.

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DEAR MISS MANNERS: Sometimes, among relatives, it becomes a necessity for one to disseminate a small portion of private, personal information, if only to get one's mother off their back.

If I choose to share this information with this particular relative (my mother), should I not expect that information to remain the privilege of the particular person it was shared with?

I understand that it would be improper of me to reprove someone (least of all my mother) for betraying the trust of personal information, but short of not sharing said information, is there anything one could say beforehand to try and hinder this type of behavior?

GENTLE READER: Of course you should not reprove your mother. The customary method, Miss Manners believes, is to blackmail her.

This is done by saying, "You know, I'd love to talk things over with you, but these are highly confidential matters, and if you're tempted to tell anyone, I'd better not."

Your mother will, of course, promise silence (meaning that she will ask her confidants not to tell, thus expecting more loyalty from them than she is willing to give you). That is when you issue your threat: "OK, but if you find you can't resist, it's sure to get back to me, and it will make me reluctant to tell you anything again, which would deprive me of your wisdom."

DEAR MISS MANNERS: In an attempt to beat the heat last night, I went to my local coffeehouse and camped out in the air-conditioning with an iced chai and a book.

A woman sat down three chairs away. She flipped open her laptop, and suddenly the speakers began playing an Italian-language tutorial. Since I don't speak Italian, and have no desire to learn, I found this frustrating.

After 30 minutes of this, she treated us to music from her laptop. The establishment had been playing Nina Simone over the loudspeakers -- quietly -- but the woman drowned this out with her discordant heavy metal. Glares and dirty looks failed to elicit a response. Finally, frustrated, I got up and stalked out into the heat.

Oddly enough, the gentlemen sitting next to me had a conversation at almost the same decibel level, but I didn't find this offensive in the least.

Both you and my mother have always said it's rude to tell someone when they are being rude. But is there any way to inform this young lady that she is impinging her will upon the rest of the customers, and that this is not done in polite society? Perhaps she honestly didn't know any better -- her mama didn't teach her the same things mine did.

OK, that's ingenuous, but it was the only approach I could think of and stay within the bounds of manners. Any thoughts or possible future solutions? The weatherman says it's going to be hot again next week and this may happen again.

GENTLE READER: Sorry, but neither your mother nor Miss Manners considers the pseudo-pitying comment that the offender doesn't know any better to be exempt from the rule against calling people rude.

You do not inform the offender; you inform the coffeehouse management. As these become more like 16th-century coffeehouses, each will have to decide whether it wants to be a home for the noisemakers or the quiet types, and customers will have to choose their establishments accordingly.

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When Miss Manners reads of the return of hats, handkerchiefs, full slips, petticoats, trains on dresses, dresses themselves, or other sartorial signs of civilized life, she struggles to contain her excitement.

This does not, she has learned, herald her own return to being in fashion after a century or two of ladylike retirement. It merely means that once or twice in the following season, she will spot a young lady wearing a slip or petticoat with corset in place of a dress; or an evening dress in which a train has been constructed by removing the yardage that ought to cover the legs in front and tacking it onto the back; or a garden hat worn with what appear to be gardening clothes; or a handkerchief used as a pocket doily while the job of wiping the nose is retained by the paper industry.

Even those sightings will soon disappear, to be followed by a return to modern minimalism, itself a fashion that has accumulated a venerable history by now. Miss Manners is resigned to this, even if it renders useless her knowledge of how to handle complicated accoutrements. (Sample: When wearing a train in a crowded room, make occasional, small, inconspicuous turns in the same direction until you have made a complete circle in place. That way, your train will gather gracefully around you, so that when people approach you -- and people always approach a train-bearing lady -- they will not walk on your dress.)

But when she read in the fashion news that gloves were coming back -- gloves worn not against the cold or boxing opponents, but for their own sake -- she weakened. Could it be true?

Of course not. The pristine pair of gloves, once the symbol of gentility, has unfortunately turned into -- the symbol of gentility. It is gentility itself that has gone out of fashion.

Miss Manners was well aware of when it was that wearing gloves -- especially white gloves for ladies, but also gentlemen's dress gloves -- was scornfully rejected. It was concurrent with the rejection of etiquette. Both were declared laughably frivolous and ominously repressive.

A generation later, the concept -- although unfortunately not the practice -- of etiquette is finally back. This took an exhausting campaign, which Miss Manners would not have been able to win without the assistance of the millions who took the trouble to demonstrate to their fellow citizens what human behavior was like when unadorned by polite restraint.

But gloves retained their fearsome reputation, in spite of repeated demonstrations about what happens when people metaphorically take off the gloves. (Someone gets punched.)

To this very day, horrified young ladies ask older ones, "Didn't they used to make you wear little white gloves?"

Well, at least they didn't make us pierce our noses or navels.

Now we are at the point where the only people who don dress gloves are those who are re-enacting what they believe to be antique periods of either glamour or conformity. They remain innocent of even the simplest rules of glove etiquette, such as removing them when eating or drinking. That gloves used to lead a wildly exciting life, flirting (by floating provocatively to the ground when passing a prospect) and threatening (by whipping out the challenge to a duel) has been lost to history.

DEAR MISS MANNERS: The women's restroom in our office has three stalls and three sinks. On occasion, someone neglects to flush, or leaves an unpleasant odor behind.

What should one do if one is not the offending person, but someone else comes into the restroom and obviously notices the unpleasant condition? Is it appropriate to pretend to not notice, or should one make an exculpatory comment like "It wasn't me" in order to avoid the mistaken impression that it WAS you?

GENTLE READER-- No, no, anything but that. Never mind that this is a denial; worse yet is that it forever associates you with the smell. If you used the facility, you presumably flushed. If it is an odor, what you can say, quietly, is "I almost didn't use this because it's not very pleasant, but I didn't have time to find another bathroom, which you might want to do."

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