DEAR MISS MANNERS: As the managing partner of a law firm, I receive a steady stream of (mostly) unsolicited letters from attorneys seeking a position at the firm. I say "mostly," because occasionally we advertise for an attorney with specific qualifications, e.g., expertise in water law.

Yet, even when the advertisement is very specific, I receive dozens of letters and resumes from attorneys who do not meet the specified qualifications. Clearly, these people are simply taking a shot in the dark and hoping for the best. Do good manners and etiquette require me to respond to all these letters?

GENTLE READER: Funny that you should ask about the obligations of both manners and etiquette. Miss Manners makes a distinction between them, with manners being the principles of courteous behavior and etiquette being the particular rules that apply to a particular situation.

No, etiquette does not require that you reply to unsolicited job applications. However, it does require a response to candidates you have interviewed, a courtesy often neglected.

But Miss Manners begs you to consider the state of mind of the job seeker: hope, followed by increasingly painful doubt. Finally, the silence indicates that the application, complete with this person's professional history and hopes, was regarded as trash. Could you not find a minute to say "Sorry, we're looking for an expert in water law"? Even people who don't follow instructions have feelings.

DEAR MISS MANNERS: While having dinner, a friend of mine pointed out my lack of manners. Let me explain. While eating with my right hand, I use the left hand as a "shelf/barrier," underneath the fork or spoon in the opposite hand. I do this to prevent spillage on my blouse.

Is this inappropriate? Should I wear a bib? Ha! Do you have any suggestions about this eating technique and/or what to say to my eating companion? Now, every time I eat with this friend, I am paranoid that she is watching my every move.

GENTLE READER: It is no fun to dine with a critic, Miss Manners agrees. But neither does it sound like fun to dine across from cascading food.

Eating is a basic survival skill and is worth your learning. Presumably you do not have a medical problem, or your friend would know about it. Surely you could practice putting less food on your fork and bringing it up slowly as a more efficient way of preventing spillage on your blouse.

DEAR MISS MANNERS: Our friend just called to tell us his wife had a miscarriage. My husband told me to send flowers, and I said I wonder if it is appropriate to send flowers because it might be a reminder. What is the proper thing to do? And if we should send flowers, what would you suggest we put on the card?

GENTLE READER: That fear of "reminding" people of a tragedy they have suffered should never be a consideration. Trust Miss Manners, they have not forgotten. What they need to be reminded is that other people care and sympathize. So do, please, send those flowers, with a card that says that you are thinking of them and send your love.

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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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