DEAR MISS MANNERS: My nephew and I were having a discussion regarding eating ice cream at a business dinner. Is it considered bad manners to stir your ice cream until it is almost liquefied?

GENTLE READER: Smushing ice cream is a private pleasure. Miss Manners does not advise it at business dinners unless the desired impression is one of childish impatience. Does your nephew not know that dignified patience will have the same effect on his ice cream?

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DEAR MISS MANNERS: What do you do when you take a bite of something, say meat, and it's all bones or fat and you need to get it out of your mouth?

Discreetly put your napkin to your mouth and hide it in there? Maybe this sounds ridiculous, but I've been in that situation and I always hope I'm being inconspicuous!

GENTLE READER-- No, sorry: We all noticed the white flag you raised.

In addition to being ineffective, the napkin disguise is condemned by etiquette as a "genteelism" -- a ploy that draws unwarranted attention to its own fastidiousness. Miss Manners assures you that etiquette knows how to be straightforward when necessary.

The simple rule is that inedible food comes out the way it went in. Meat would have arrived by fork, and therefore it is deposited back on the fork for the return trip. But if you are eating something by hand, for example a grape that turns out to have a seed, you deposit the seed back into your cupped hand. Noiselessly. Etiquette is legitimately fastidious about that.

DEAR MISS MANNERS: My husband and I were acquaintances with our neighbors before we moved -- we would have dinner a couple times a year and would see them on the street regularly. They attended our wedding.

They are our parents' age, and our original motivation to get together was just to be neighborly. They have an interesting relationship -- filled with angst and anger that was expressed openly in front of us -- so we made sure not to see them too often.

My sister and her husband now live in our old place and the neighbor went out of her way to make some rude comments to my sister while my sister was in the middle of a tennis game: "Are you pregnant? Thank god (you're not). Well, you should work out more," etc.

For whatever reason, these comments were meant to be hurtful as it is the neighbor's personality to be so.

Since then, my husband and I have ignored the neighbors' attempted requests to get together. In our limited free time, I don't want to pretend to be friendly with someone so purposely hurtful.

However, the neighbor has not gotten the message, and I feel that in order for me to do the right thing, I may owe her some sort of explanation or response.

My sister doesn't want me to say anything because she runs into the neighbors occasionally, and she's afraid it may make their life more difficult. (It is a condo community, and he is president of the board.) What is the polite way for me to handle this situation?

GENTLE READER: Your suggestion seems to be to solve a minor problem for yourself by creating a major problem for your sister. This could lead to your own major problem with your sister.

Why must you explain? The way to drop acquaintances is to keep being too busy to have time for them until they give up. It is annoying when that takes a long time, as it evidently does here, but not much of a burden compared to living near antagonized neighbors.

No good ever comes of telling people why you don't like them. And Miss Manners notices that you waited to propose leveling with them until you moved safely away. Please refrain from creating an unsafe environment for your sister.

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DEAR MISS MANNERS: Please address the need to educate children in basic behavior, such as personal space, personal possessions and speaking on the phone. It seems basic manners has been lost, and children are unaware of their responsibility to be polite. Thank you from a concerned parent, grandparent and great grandparent.

GENTLE READER: You are referring to other people's children, Miss Manners trusts. As a great-grandparent, grandparent and parent, you have put years into rearing generations to have not only basic manners, but underlying respect for the needs and dignity of others.

Yes?

She feels it necessary to verify this because of the demands that so often accompany parents' outcries against mannerless children:

Why doesn't the school system teach proper behavior?

Why don't movie stars, athletes and rock stars set examples of politeness?

Why does television show people being rude?

And, most frightening of all: Why doesn't Miss Manners hold or recommend etiquette classes for children?

Because all these people have other jobs to do -- yes, even Miss Manners, whose sacred mission it is to spread the noble practice of etiquette -- and are not going to go around rearing other people's children.

Besides, it wouldn't work. Childrearing requires daily devotion over a period of years; it cannot be outsourced and compacted into a course. Truly effective role models, whether of good behavior or bad, are not the children's celebrity-heroes of the moment, but the people with whom they live.

Miss Manners admires and appreciates the many teachers, public figures, entertainers and others trying to provide such guidance for children who have been deprived of this by their parents. She has dedicated herself to spreading the need, understanding and practice of etiquette, but would appreciate more help from those directly responsible. So would their children, according to those who eventually try to catch up and complain to Miss Manners that their parents short-changed them.

DEAR MISS MANNERS: We will be invited to a couple's wedding this fall. It will be the second marriage for the bride, who has a son from the previous marriage. They are planning and paying for a large church wedding and reception, yet can not pay all their own bills consistently. A relative of the bride bails them out often from their financial obligations, and they have never repaid their debts to others.

I have expressed my disapproval of such a large and costly event, and am compelled to not attend in protest of the lack of responsibility the two of these people are displaying. Do you believe they are being irresponsible or am I being overly sensitive?

GENTLE READER: "Overly sensitive" is not the term Miss Manners would use to describe people who would boycott a wedding because the couple did not follow their financial advice.

Even she, who counsels against exaggerated weddings on taste grounds, including to those who can afford them, veils her eyes to dissention when she attends the weddings of those she cares about.

But wait -- those "others" who were not paid back by the couple or by the relative who bails them out. Are you one of them?

In that case, Miss Manners can understand your discomfort at being asked to watch the money you are owed being gobbled up by live doves and monogrammed balloons. She only asks you to decline politely without using the wedding invitation as an opening to explain your disapproval.

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