We already know that anonymous letters are despicable. In etiquette, as well as in law, hiring a hit man to do the job does not relieve you of responsibility.
Most people who work at home find they do not have the benefit of receptionists who serve as personal guards.
You do not have to do everything disagreeable that you have a right to do.
We are born charming, fresh and spontaneous and must be civilized before we are fit to participate in society.
Chaperons, even in their days of glory, were almost never able to enforce morality; what they did was to force immorality to be discreet. This is no small contribution.
Honesty has come to mean the privilege of insulting you to your face without expecting redress.
When a society abandons its ideals just because most people can't live up to them, behavior gets very ugly indeed.
You glance at an e-mail. You give more attention to a real letter.
For email, the old postcard rule applies. Nobody else is supposed to read your postcards, but you'd be a fool if you wrote anything private on one.
My children did not go through a stage of being rude to their parents. I'm sorry if that sounds incredible.
Obviously I'm going to be polite, so nobody has anything to fear from me.
The language of clothing is high symbolism and we all, in moments where we need to know this, realize it.
I am a traditionalist, and I'm an innovator. Most of what I do is to weigh change and legislate to the best of my ability on what should change and what should not. Do I have a respect for tradition? Of course I do. Do I have a blind belief in it? No.
Etiquette does not render you defenseless. If it did, even I wouldn't subscribe to it. But rudeness in retaliation for rudeness just doubles the amount of rudeness in the world.
Over the last couple of decades, the personalization of the office changed dramatically... there's an informality people often take for the absence of rules - which it's not.
Presents are symbolic. When you give them in your personal life, they should show that you are paying attention to the person to whom you're giving them.
Learn graceful ways of saying no and of pointing out that this pressure to do something is not in line with most people's wishes.
We're now seeing email that people thought they had deleted showing up as evidence in court. You can't erase email. As that becomes more commonly realized, people will be a little wiser about what they type.
One of the big no-nos in cyberspace is that you do not go into a social activity, a chat group or something like that, and start advertising or selling things. This etiquette rule is an attempt to separate one's social life, which should be pure enjoyment and relaxation, from the pressures of work.
