DEAR MISS MANNERS: My problem is not one of mistaken identity, but rather one of accidentally revealed identity!

I am a regular participant in an active online discussion group, and while heated debates over politics and religion are the norm there, we usually manage to keep things civil.

One prolific participant is a sort of self-appointed expert on many things, and makes quite a thing of the fact that she has two bachelors degrees and reads a lot. She goes to great pains to try to make people see her as smart and interesting.

As a result, she is one of the people most likely to end up embroiled in a personal argument, and has revealed a lot about her off-line life. She recently posted a link to something with her real full name on it, and it turns out that this is someone I have known, or at least known about, in the past. She is a former friend of a friend, who was known, years ago, to have stirred up quite a bit of controversy, told a lot of damaging lies about someone and generally hurt a lot of people.

It also appears that she has told some blatant lies about herself and her past in our online forum.

I'm trying to decide how to proceed with her, and with the rest of the group. Would it be wrong of me to continue to participate in discussions with her without revealing that I know who she is? Do I have any responsibility to point out to the rest of the group the posts where she's lied about her life? I have no idea what etiquette dictates in a situation like this.

GENTLE READER: Excuse Miss Manners for being naive, but don't we assume that most self-sketches on anonymous groups are at least embroidered, if not outright fantasy? Surely the question is whether you should reveal her identity, not whether you can keep participating without doing so.

Where anonymity is presumed, even by the careless, you should not spread her name. Where is the clear and present danger from which you would be protecting the other participants? It isn't as though you had discovered that your friend's fiance was wanted for the murder of his first three wives.

You do note that this person is being contentious with the other participants. But that is one nice thing about unpleasant people -- they can be counted upon to identify themselves as such. She sounds well on her way to alienating the others without your assistance.

DEAR MISS MANNERS: Will you please give me some rules of etiquette for people staying at someone's home for periods of three days or LONGER?

GENTLE READER: Does your putting LONGER in capital letters mean you want Miss Manners to tell them to GO HOME? If you did not take the precaution of setting the date in advance, you should start thanking them for coming.

Getting them to pitch in may be harder, except for the kind of guests who take over when you don't want them to. They should be cleaning up after themselves, inviting you out to dinner, falling in with your plans yet leaving you free time by making plans of their own, volunteering for specific tasks but asking you how you would like them done, being good company, using their own telephones and pretending not to hear anything they shouldn't.

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DEAR MISS MANNERS: I was changing my baby's diaper in a public restroom the other day. The changing table had no privacy whatsoever, and anyone walking in or out of the restroom had full view of what was going on.

While most people seemed to avert their eyes, there was one woman who, while waiting for her children to wash their hands, kept looking over at my daughter while her diaper was off, and it made me very uncomfortable and upset. I don't feel that staring at anyone, no matter how old, in that position is right.

What would be an appropriate way to say, "Would you please stop staring at my half-naked daughter, it's quite rude"?

GENTLE READER: "Would you like to help?"

DEAR MISS MANNERS: My wife is a voracious reader, almost to the point of it being a compulsion. This is not a problem most of the time, but she insists on reading at the table. Breakfast, lunch or dinner finds her with a magazine or newspaper next to her place setting and she sometimes does not even look away to get another bite of food.

I have told her in the past that I think this is very rude behavior and her response was that we don't talk at the table anyway.

I admit that I am not a great talker at any time; my family did not converse a great deal at the table, as hers always has. But having a person glued to the printed page does not foster communication. She will look up briefly to respond when I do have something to say but goes immediately back to her reading.

It has gotten to the point that I simply eat quickly and leave the table. I wonder if there is something I could say to lessen this behavior without facing a stony silence and the feeling that it is I who has been rude. Or am I being overly sensitive to this?

GENTLE READER: Not sensitive enough. You have picked up on the etiquette problem, which is that it is rude to read at the table when dining with another person, but not on the marital problem, which is that you and your wife apparently have nothing to say to each other.

The two are related. Breaking bread together is the most basic of human rituals, precisely because it provides families, friends and colleagues with an opportunity to bond. That many families have abandoned the nightly ritual of dinner together strikes Miss Manners has tragic.

But you might as well have abandoned it, for all the good it is doing either of you. Stony silence would be markedly unpleasant, but blank silence is no fun, either.

Yes, it is rude to read at the table. But Miss Manners is afraid that a general agreement to talk will not break the impasse. Rather, you will have to initiate conversation by thinking up topics that will interest and engage your wife -- surely you at least once knew what they were -- and speaking with enthusiasm to give her a pleasant alternative.

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DEAR MISS MANNERS: I just read about the tradition of requiring morning attire (until now translated as tails, pearl or black vest and striped pants) of all Justice Department employees appearing before the Supreme Court at oral argument.

Given all the precedent-setting possibilities implicit in this scenario, what would you recommend the new female Solicitor General do? Law is one of the few areas of life left that people take tradition and symbols seriously, and I thought you might be able to add an interesting -- and much needed -- perspective grounded in a real appreciation of etiquette.

GENTLE READER: Actually, nearly every profession or activity takes seriously its own traditions and symbolic clothing, whether formal or informal. It is not just the law, but also the military, the worlds of sports and of music, brides, street gangs and, oh yes, etiquette. Ordinary people do, too, which is why rock stars look like members of a church choir when they have to face a jury.

But the question of the Solicitor General is a hard one for Miss Manners. Not only is she generally fond of tradition, but she hardly gets to see anyone in proper morning clothes, now that presidents have decided that their inaugurations are not all that formal (or are afraid that top hats make them look like cartoon plutocrats). Japanese statesman and the occasional daytime bridegroom are about it.

In the Court, that formality symbolizes the stature of the executive branch's representative, respect for the highest members of the judicial branch and the importance of the occasion. Well and good.

However, these clothes, equally suitable for major daytime ceremonies and social life, are for gentlemen. The ladies' equivalent, of softly flowing dresses with hats, is strictly social. That makes them ridiculously out of place in a professional context. Not to mention that the variety expected in feminine clothes would be prohibitively expensive.

One solution has been simply to put the male clothes on females. Waitresses in fancy restaurants wear male evening clothes. Miss Manners finds the symbolism offensive, as it symbolically concedes that she is an ersatz male doing a male's job. But neither does Miss Manners approve the female slackness she sees in orchestras, where male musicians wear proper evening clothes and many female musicians slop around in anything black.

So unless some great designer can come up with a standard, professional-looking formal dress -- the formal equivalent of the everyday feminine daytime pants suits taken up by many stateswomen -- morning attire will have to disappear. It is a shame, but Miss Manners is afraid that the negative symbolism outweighs the positive.

DEAR MISS MANNERS: I am a professor at a large public university and recently asked the gentleman friend I have been dating for over a year if he would accompany me to a university social function.

He agreed, but three days before this event he told me he could not attend because he had just been invited to the 50th birthday party of a longtime friend and there was a time conflict.

What do I do? Stay home or attend the university event on my own and make his excuses?

GENTLE READER: Of course you should go. Miss Manners hopes you, at least, know how rude it is to throw over an engagement. Unless, of course, it is an engagement to be married.

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