DEAR MISS MANNERS: My fiance and I are both well-established young adults who honestly have little or no use for additional household items that would typically be set aside for wedding gifts. We are paying for the wedding ourselves because none of our parents are able to afford to help us with the cost.

We are wondering what is the easiest and most polite way of asking for a monetary donation to offset the cost of the wedding because we are paying for it ourselves.

GENTLE READER: No, you are not paying for it yourselves, no matter how often you proclaim that. You are scheming to ask your guests to pay for it.

Miss Manners realizes that it will come as a shock to many bridal couples to hear that their weddings are not shows that carry admission fees. However, there is no remotely polite way to ask guests to pay for the hospitality you pretend to offer them.

DEAR MISS MANNERS: I wished a widower of a little over one month a "nice summer" and was told by a co-worker that it was insensitive and "too soon" to offer well wishes.

Is it? I understand that people grieve, but do we, the living, not need to keep on living?

GENTLE READER: Had you not tried to justify yourself, Miss Manners would have defended you. Such wishes are so conventional as to emerge almost automatically. And anyway, your co-worker should not be chastising you.

But that remark about the living needing to go on living -- another automatic truism -- troubles her.

Yes, we all know that it is true. The widower was probably not trying to throw himself into his wife's grave. But it is not up to you, or anyone else, to announce how or how long the bereaved should grieve.

DEAR MISS MANNERS: My daughter is having a party tomorrow to celebrate her fifth birthday. I found out this morning that one of her friends has gotten her a present she already has.

I have instructed her, and had her practice, what to do if she opens a present she already has or does not particularly like at her party -- to say "thank you" and move on to the next one. However, I was hoping this was something she wouldn't actually have to deal with.

Since I know ahead of time, should I let the parent know, or let it go and deal with it after the party? I don't want the parent to feel I am asking her to do more work by returning the present and getting another one.

GENTLE READER: Then why would you be less gracious than you have advised your daughter to be? Why would the friend's parent think that you told her unless you expected her to run out and get another present in time?

Of course that would be the only way your daughter would be, as you say, spared. That would be discomforting and inconveniencing a guest in order to spare your daughter the necessity of practicing good hostess manners.

(Please send your questions to Miss Manners at her website, www.missmanners.com; to her email, dearmissmanners@gmail.com; or through postal mail to Miss Manners, Universal Uclick, 1130 Walnut St., Kansas City, MO 64106.)

DEAR MISS MANNERS: At a dining-with-clients etiquette lunch, the presenter said either spoon or fork works for dessert. My mother, who thought of herself as a bit of a Miss Manners, used to tell me, "If served in a bowl you use a spoon, if on a plate you use a fork." So if you get ice cream on a plate, you eat it with a fork.

GENTLE READER: You will be relieved to hear that there is such a thing as an ice cream fork. It has a spoon-like bowl that ends in short, wide tines, useful for breaking off chunks. This configuration, in various sizes, is sometimes characterized as a spork, or, for fans of Edward Lear, a runcible spoon.

You should be even more relieved to hear that etiquette is not a system for disrupting meals to humiliate the hungry. It requires providing the necessary tools for eating whatever is served, placed in the order in which the courses will be eaten.

Thus, a spoon would be provided with a squishy dessert (Miss Manners' favorite kind), and a fork with a drier dessert, such as cake. And, yes, the gooey sort would likely occupy a bowl and the others a plate. That is the basis for your mother's instruction.

As for eating ice cream from a plate with only an ordinary fork, a nearly impossible task, your mother must have been cautioning you to make do without embarrassing the idiotic host who served it that way.

But even chocolate and vanilla desserts are not all black and white. That is why the proper dessert service consists of both a fork and a spoon in all but cases where only one or the other would be of use.

DEAR MISS MANNERS: We moved to a different area of the country to be near our daughter, who has some health issues, and to help with our granddaughters. We have made new friends in this smaller community, and our next-door neighbors have helped us immensely and have become very good friends.

The wife has looked at the pictures of my son and daughter and remarked that neither looks like my husband.

There is a reason for that; I was impregnated by donor sperm from separate men (wasn't really a donation; we had to pay for it). Only my husband and I know the children's true biological history. I have brushed off the questions, but she persists in asking.

My husband told her: "They look just like the milkman; he was very cute. I never could understand why we didn't get a bill for milk." This hasn't stopped her.

I really would like to stay friends with this couple, but her questioning doesn't stop. I know I can be confrontational ("Why do you keep asking" or "Mind your own business") with her, but that will create more questions. Any suggestions how to curtail the questions and keep a friendship going?

GENTLE READER: Are you sure you want to be friends with someone who asks nosy questions with insulting implications?

Well, all right; that's not up to Miss Manners. She suggests saying: "I don't think you understood that my husband was joking about the milkman. Of course he thought you must be joking to make such remarks. Let's just drop the whole subject."

(Please send your questions to Miss Manners at her website, www.missmanners.com; to her email, dearmissmanners@gmail.com; or through postal mail to Miss Manners, Universal Uclick, 1130 Walnut St., Kansas City, MO 64106.)

DEAR MISS MANNERS: In regard to Americans bowing to royalty, I firmly agree with you that bowing in subservience to another person is out of the question. (I would assume that a bow to a Japanese person is different, since both parties bow as a sign of respect.)

But what would be the protocol if one were to meet Queen Elizabeth in England? Would the circumstances change if the visit was at her palace vs. a public venue?

I have no plans to meet any royalty anytime soon, but I am curious as to how it would be handled.

GENTLE READER: Unless, heaven forbid, you are an envoy of the U.S. government who has been sent to deliver a retroactive surrender to our former British rulers, you should not pay obeisance to the queen.

We fought hard not to have to do so. Why give in now? The next thing we knew, she'd be taxing our tea and impressing our sailors.

Miss Manners assures you that the British have now accepted the loss of their American colonies with good grace and do not expect Americans to kneel to their queen anywhere.

Japan is more complicated, quite aside from the fact that we won a war there, too. The order and angle of bowing to different people are both significant, so that unless you are a student of Japanese etiquette, you are likely to be sending wrong, if not insulting, signals.

Fortunately, the Japanese are polite enough to make allowances for ignorant foreigners. As foreign royals generally realize that non-subjects who bow to them are doing so from ignorance, not from the intention to surrender.

DEAR MISS MANNERS: How do you handle women who shamelessly flirt with your husband in front of you? This happens frequently at a club we belong to where there are many widows and divorcees -- wealthy women looking for a man.

GENTLE READER: You do not handle them. Your husband does. How you handle him later in private is up to you.

DEAR MISS MANNERS: My husband committed suicide at home. This obviously was a tragic event for me and my young son.

We had a public viewing, and a client, his wife and his daughter attended. This client is, and has continuously been, very abusive to me and my company, and in a recent email accused me of not personally thanking him for attending the viewing by email, card or phone call. I did thank him while at the viewing.

What is appropriate? Should I have sent cards to all attendees?

GENTLE READER: What makes you think that this client might be an authority on etiquette?

His demand to be lauded for the simple decency of paying respects to the dead? His berating you, especially in the midst of such a tragedy? His previously abusive behavior?

Had he written you a letter of memories and condolences, or had he done something helpful -- brought meals, performed errands -- he would have deserved a letter of thanks. Miss Manners assures you that your thanks for his offering you sympathy at the viewing was sufficient. That is, if he did actually offer you any sympathy.

(Please send your questions to Miss Manners at her website, www.missmanners.com; to her email, dearmissmanners@gmail.com; or through postal mail to Miss Manners, Universal Uclick, 1130 Walnut St., Kansas City, MO 64106.)