Etiquette

As I write in my Manifesto, manners serve the purpose of helping those around us feel simultaneously comfortable and inspired. This page gathers my own small contribution to that project — my Manual for Etiquette, Manners, and Style — alongside a few thoughts on what etiquette is actually for.

The Manual

If you enjoy helpful instructions, please consider picking up a copy of my Manual for Etiquette, Manners, and Style. It is pleasantly readable on any manner of electronic screens, but in hardcopy it’s a lovely compact tome and tucks so very nicely (at four by six inches) into most reasonably sized pockets. In order for it to be easily accessible, whatever your means, it is priced affordably, and is available on Amazon in Kindle, paperback, and other formats.

Etiquette, Rightly Understood

Etiquette has an image problem. Too often it is mistaken for a scorecard — a set of rules kept in reserve so that the person who knows them may quietly (or not so quietly) find fault with the person who doesn’t. Used this way, it becomes a small cruelty dressed up as refinement: a means of drawing a line and standing on the correct side of it.

That is precisely backwards. Etiquette, properly understood, is not a weapon for excluding people who don’t already belong — it is a tool for helping strangers become comfortable with one another quickly. It is the accumulated, shared knowledge of how to behave so that the people around you can relax: so a new acquaintance knows which fork is which not because the fork matters, but because not having to wonder about the fork leaves more of the evening for conversation. The point was never the rule. The point was always the ease it was meant to produce.

Judith Martin, who has spent decades answering etiquette questions as Miss Manners, has made this case more plainly than almost anyone. Of the actual function of the rules she is so often teased for defending, she has written: “Etiquette enables you to resolve conflict without just trading insults.” That is the whole argument in ten words — etiquette exists to lower the temperature of encounters between people who might otherwise not know how to be gracious with one another, not to raise it. She draws a related distinction worth borrowing: manners are the underlying principle of consideration for others, universal and unchanging, while etiquette is simply the particular, arbitrary vocabulary a given time and place uses to express that consideration. Learn the local vocabulary, in other words, and you can put nearly anyone at ease.

Emily Post made a similar point more gently, describing etiquette not as a code of rigid correctness but as nothing more or less than an awareness of how people’s lives touch one another, and behaving accordingly. Two people who have never met, brought into a room together, need some shared understanding of how to proceed — who speaks first, how close to stand, what may be asked and what may not — or the whole encounter is left to improvisation and nerves. Etiquette is simply that shared understanding, worked out in advance, so that no one has to invent it from scratch under pressure.

This is why I think of etiquette as a kind of hospitality, and why it belongs so naturally alongside the rest of what I try to do — hosting, photographing, building small elegant spaces for people to be themselves in. A well-run gathering and a well-observed manner are doing the same work: absorbing the awkwardness so your guests don’t have to carry it. Anyone using etiquette to make a new acquaintance feel small has misunderstood the assignment entirely.