DEAR MISS MANNERS: I have frequently taken secret delight in eating asparagus with my fingers, which I know from your etiquette advice is correct. My husband and I were discussing this practice at the dinner table this evening, as we gently corrected our young offspring in their continuing efforts to pick up errant peas with their fingers.

This is something of a "tree falls in the forest" question: The asparagus rule is, in my experience, not very well known (although perhaps that says something about the company I keep). If one is attending a dinner party at which a lovely dish of lightly steamed asparagus is served, and one proceeds to convey one's stalks to one's mouth via fingers; if the other dinner guests are unaware of the asparagus rule and are shocked and offended, has a breach of etiquette been perpetrated?

Of course, polite people would not point out their dismay, and a polite person would not try to correct the offendees' erroneous assumption of wrongdoing. However, one can tell by the quietly shocked expressions, quickly masked, that one has offended.

In other words, if they don't know it's really OK, and they think you're a slob, have you committed an etiquette faux pas? If you suspect it might look pretty snooty to eat with your fingers and then quote Miss Manners as your authority, should you just quietly cut the asparagus with your knife and fork, as the hostess is doing? Is it correct to eat asparagus with knife and fork if you prefer?

GENTLE READER: Well, yes, it is also correct to eat asparagus without causing a sensation. But when you consider how few ways perfectly polite people have of causing a sensation, surely you will not begrudge Miss Manners this one.

It is true that on rare occasions, the super-polite may refrain from doing something correct to avoid embarrassing others. Stories about drinking the finger bowl water -- to prevent a misguided guest who has done so from the humiliation of knowing his error -- are attached to practically every halfway-humane monarch in history.

But that is not the same as running the risk of being thought incorrect when one is not. Miss Manners imagines that anyone so rude as to go around reporting this supposed error will eventually get his comeuppance from someone who knows the rule.

Nor is it a case of the tree in the forest. The true application of that to etiquette is that errors committed in total privacy do not count. Miss Manners does not advise telling this to your children.

DEAR MISS MANNERS: I have two very good friends who are married to each other. The wife has a doctorate; the husband does not. When I see them, I usually hug the doctor first, and then her husband. When I leave, I say bye to them in the same order: doctor, then husband. I know the doctor a little better than her husband, but is this the correct order of things? Just wondering.

GENTLE READER: You have left Miss Manners wondering what the lady's being A Doctor has to do with this. Surely you don't think hugs are ranked by academic achievement. Perhaps you just like saying it about your friend. In any case, she is the one to greet first, because she is the lady.

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DEAR MISS MANNERS: My cell phone is my only phone line, and I have taken to treating it as I would a landline. That is, when I am not at home, I regularly turn it off or choose not to answer it.

This past weekend, my fiance's parents were in town, and I spent Saturday and Sunday showing them around our city. I noticed that a friend phoned several times, but since there was no emergency (her voice message said she was just calling "to chat"), I did not pick up. I thought doing so would be rude to my future in-laws. I was planning to return her call tonight.

Today I received an angry e-mail from my friend. She knows that I carry my cell phone at all times, and thus did not think there could have been any justifiable reason why I would not pick up her call. When I explained the in-law situation, she said I could have simply stepped away from the group for a moment to answer the phone and set up another time to talk.

This seems ridiculous to me. If it were 10 years ago and I had no cell phone, I wouldn't have even known my friend was phoning, much less been forced to speak to her right away. Are there new rules with cell phones? This isn't the first time a friend has gotten angry for not being able to get in immediate contact and I'm starting to feel guilty. What can I say the next time it happens?

GENTLE READER: Do you remember the early days of the landline answering machine? It seems laughable now, but huge numbers of people had worked themselves up into believing that it was the height of rudeness to own such an instrument of the devil. How dare anyone not live at the beck and call of whoever wanted to summon him?

Soon everybody had them. It turns out that no one wants to live that way -- although everyone wants to find other people instantly available.

As Miss Manners recalls, we had a few moments of peace there before the cellular telephone came along to create the same hostility and the same expectations.

You friends will get over it. They can leave voice messages, text messages and send photographs of themselves with pleading faces, but they should not persuade you that it is ruder to ignore them than to ignore the people who are actually there in front of you.

DEAR MISS MANNERS: My husband and I are invited to a 50th birthday party of a casual friend. The invitation asks that we spend at least a minute on a microphone and tell him what we like about him, and to shower him with kind words. We are very offended by this request; what do you suggest?

GENTLE READER: That you duck when you see the microphone coming your way, or you merely say that you want to congratulate the guest of honor and wish him the best.

Miss Manners would have thought that obviously coerced flattery would be embarrassing to him. In any case, you are not obliged to fill the assigned allotment of airtime.

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DEAR MISS MANNERS: My wife and I have been married to each other for 40 years. When I ask her to hand me a spoon or anything for that matter, she expects me to say please before asking and thank you when she complies.

I was raised by a mother who emphasized proper manners, and I have never been criticized for improper manners before outside of this request for please and thank you every time I turn around.

As a matter of fact, I think she is the one who is displaying poor manners in requesting this. What if I need something in a hurry like a fire extinguisher? Should I say, "Please pass the fire extinguisher, as the stove is on fire"? I need your answer.

GENTLE READER: Oh, come now. Surely you didn't really believe that you would catch Miss Manners with that chestnut about etiquette being so dumb that it expects polite people to burn alive rather than disobey a rule.

But such sacrifice is unnecessary. It happens that the correct thing to say -- in fact to shout -- in cases of fire is "Fire!"

The more imminent danger, she would think, is to your marriage. Forty years and a day or a week or a month could bring the moment when a courtesy-free union becomes no longer tolerable. Your mother may have allowed you to be rude to her (or it is only spouses whom she considered exempt from the consideration given to people of less importance in your life?), but your wife has made it known that she does not care for it.

DEAR MISS MANNERS: When I lost a parent, I kept a careful list of those who signed the guest book, sent flowers, donated to a charity, or gave a special service such as bringing food to the house.

I began immediately sending thank-you notes at the rate of four or five per day, three that would not be emotionally taxing, and one or two that would be difficult for me to write. I sent short but very specific handwritten notes to most people, but longer letters to those who had performed many acts of kindness and assistance in the previous months.

In this very small community, I now find that people have literally compared notes, and some are upset with me because they were not among the first to receive notes or because they received the shorter notes.

Have I been unintentionally rude? Should all notes have been equal? Should I have saved them all to mail on the same day? I want to do this correctly the next time it comes up.

GENTLE READER: Miss Manners wondered what had happened to all those people who, in Victorian times, would keep track of when the bereaved relieved their heavy black mourning clothes with touches of lavender, so they could complain that it was too soon. They must have all moved to your town.

What is puzzling is that these are people who had been kind to you. Why are they now criticizing you for being thoughtful? Did they really not understand that you could have dashed off a computerized form letter so that they all would receive the same one on the same day?

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