Fucking Good Manners E-Book

Simon Griffin

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 183

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

This is not a book about how to be posh. We have some slightly bigger issues to deal with these days. We've all got a million things to do and are constantly connected to millions of other people all doing a million other things, so the faster we get things done the better, right? Wrong. Among all the busyness and confusion it seems we've forgotten a few of the basics in life, like the ability to treat one another with respect, dignity and some fucking good manners. Enter Simon Griffin, author of Fucking Apostrophes. From the entry-level stuff like saying please, thank you and sorry; manspreading on public transport and double-lane queuing at airports, to those that require just a little bit more thought, such as correct urinal protocol in public toilets, making tea rounds in the office and online public displays of affection, Simon imparts rules and advice to living life in a way that makes it just a bit better for everyone. With some liberal use of rude words thrown in to emphasise the point. With chapters on driving, social media, the environment, getting on with your neighbours, and the best manners for a trip to the cinema, this is the perfect gift for a manners enthusiast, or those in need of a gentle (but sweary) nudge in the right direction.

Leseprobe

FUCKING GOOD MANNERS

SIMON GRIFFIN

For Mum and Dad. Sorry for all the rude words.

And for Jo, who lovingly puts up with my own fucking bad manners every day.

‘As we look for new answers in the modern age, I for one prefer the tried and tested recipes, like speaking well of each other and respecting different points of view, coming together to seek out the common ground and never losing sight of the bigger picture.’

HM QUEEN ELIZABETH II,24 JANUARY 2019

Rough translation:

‘We need to learn some fucking good manners.’

A BRIEF NOTE ON SWEARING

There’s a general rule in life that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. In this case, however, you can probably make an exception, and you should use it as a pretty good guide to the contents. This is a book about good manners, with multiple uses of the word fucking (or variations thereof) dropped liberally throughout it. Four hundred and seventy-five uses, to be precise.

Swearing is considered impolite when broadcast in public, but whether it’s acceptable does depend on the company you’re in. Assuming that you’ve already read the title and it’s piqued your interest enough to open it and read more, we’ll assume you’re OK with some potty language. If you’re looking to learn about good manners and are likely to be offended by such words, then I would recommend any of the titles listed at the back in the fucking bibliography.

CONTENTS

TITLE PAGEDEDICATIONEPIGRAPHA BRIEF NOTE ON SWEARINGINTRODUCTIONA HISTORY OF MANNERS1. BASIC MANNERS2. PUBLIC TRANSPORT3. DRIVING4. THE CINEMA5. THE SHOPS6. PUBLIC TOILETS7. QUEUING8. NEIGHBOURS AND COMMUNITY9. THE ENVIRONMENT10. THE WORKPLACE11. EMAILS12. SOCIAL MEDIATEN FUCKING GOOD MANNERSCONCLUSIONACKNOWLEDGEMENTSNOTESBIBLIOGRAPHYABOUT THE AUTHORCOPYRIGHT

INTRODUCTION

‘The hardest job kids face today is learning good manners without seeing any.’

FRED ASTAIRE

A book on manners wouldn’t hold much credibility without beginning with a thank you for buying it. If you didn’t buy it, please pass on my sincere gratitude to whoever purchased it for you. If you’re just browsing through a friend’s toilet library, then thanks for selecting it over old copies of National Geographic and unread Christmas gifts. Please make sure you leave the room as you found it and wash your hands on the way out. If you’ve stolen it, well, perhaps reading it might help you see the error of your ways.

It’s important to clarify straight away that this isn’t a book about how to be posh. It’s not something to refer to when you unexpectedly receive an invitation to Buckingham Palace or the White House. It will be of little to no use if you’re looking for pointers on how much to tip, nor will it enlighten you on the correct protocol for entering into courtship with a dignitary’s offspring.

I’ve read numerous books that contain these ‘gems’ of wisdom and quickly discovered that, as useful as they once were, we’ve got some slightly bigger fucking issues to deal with these days. Society on both sides of the Atlantic feels more divided than it ever has, and in among all the confusion we’ve let our behaviour get a little out of control.

I’m in no way suggesting that lowering the volume of your music or letting someone into traffic are more important than finding a solution to reducing plastic waste or policies on national security. Just that we can’t lower ourselves to the levels of screaming, shouting and stamping our feet about things, simply because we haven’t got our way – that behaviour is reserved for humans under the age of five, the cast of TOWIE and anyone who’s appeared on The Apprentice. Life isn’t fucking fair, but we should be able to demonstrate our ability to get the basics right before we move on to the more complex stuff.

It’s more difficult than it sounds. When dealing with such sensitive subjects it’s extremely likely that emotions will run high, but we need to hold our heads equally high and maintain some dignity. The quick and easy response is to speak louder and more forcefully; the harder and more time-consuming way is to listen and understand the other side of the argument (and there’s always another side), and use that to come to a sensible solution.

And there’s part of the fucking problem: time. Manners have nothing to do with class or wealth – as so frequently demonstrated by a variety of overpaid public figures – they cost nothing, after all. But they do take time, and in our busy little bubbles that’s almost more valuable than money. We’re cash-rich and time-poor, so who gives a fuck if we offend a few people by cutting our nails on the train or pushing to the front of the queue? You’ll probably never see those individuals again anyway. We’ve all got a million things to do and are constantly connected to other people doing a million other things, so the faster we can get things done the better, right? Well, wrong. The faster we get things done, the faster we get them done. The better way always takes a lot more time.

Another issue that’s causing us some major fucking problems in the good manners department is our increasing connectivity with the rest of the world. Back in the hunter-gatherer days our contact with other humans would be limited to how far we could walk, but then we learned how to domesticate horses, and that number grew a little more. Fast forward a couple of thousand years and we’ve invented bicycles, cars, buses, trains and aeroplanes – machines that have the ability to take us to new countries and cultures in the time it takes to not watch a couple of Liam Neeson films. Add the online community to this and we’re suddenly thrown together with thousands of people on a daily basis. It’s simply not possible to be nice to all of them.

British anthropologist Robin Dunbar knows a thing or two about how many friends one person needs. That’s why he wrote a book called How Many Friends Does One Person Need? His research into primates shows a direct correspondence between the size of the brain’s neocortex (which deals with complex shit like high-order functions) and ‘the number of people you can have a relationship with involving trust and obligation.’1

That number – now known as ‘Dunbar’s Number’ – is 150. Compare that to the number of people you come into contact with on an average day – on the train, in the shops, in the toilets, in the MailOnline comments section – and you start to get an idea of exactly how many complete strangers our lives are filled with. Amy Alkon notes in her book Good Manners For Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck, ‘We’re experiencing more rudeness because we’ve lost the constraints on our behaviour that we’ve had in place for millions of years … You can behave terribly to strangers and have a good chance of getting away with it because you’ll probably never see your victims again.’

Our brains simply aren’t designed to cope with the scale of modern human interaction, so we shield ourselves away from these strangers, switch off our emotions and forget our fucking manners. As Graham Waters (Don Cheadle) says in 2004’s Crash: ‘We’re always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other just so we can feel something.’

We’re also living in a world that increasingly blurs the lines between private and public, between formal and informal, and we’ve lost the ability to distinguish between the two. Whether it’s a result of social media, journalism or whataboutism, a habit seems to be developing where what’s acceptable in the home among friends, is also acceptable in public among complete fucking strangers. We pass off offensive comments in the workplace or on the street as friendly ‘banter’ (or bantz, as it’s often known) when in fact it’s just plain fucking rude. We’ve got office bantz and pub bantz and locker room bantz and sexist bantz and political bantz. I couldn’t give a rat’s arse about ‘I am who I am’, ‘Be yourself’, ‘Just do it’ or whatever pseudo-motivational sports shoe slogan you choose to live your life by, there’s a time and a place for everything. How you behave with friends in private is a very fucking different thing to how you should conduct yourself in public.

Passing off offensive comments as banter is nothing new. Whether it’s Chris Morris satirising paedophiles or suicide bombers, Frankie Boyle talking about the Paralympics, or Kathy Griffin holding up a severed head of Donald Trump, you’ll always find someone, somewhere pushing the boundaries of decency.

Of course you can be funny without being rude, but a fairly large proportion of comedy is likely to be offensive in some way to someone, somewhere. There’s normally a butt to every joke. Lenny Bruce, Andy Kaufman, Bill Hicks, Joan Rivers, Richard Pryor, Russell Brand, Michael Richards, Doug Stanhope, Kevin Hart, Sarah Silverman, Roseanne Barr and Jo Brand have all had their bottoms smacked publicly at some point for overstepping the mark on a number of subjects, including race, religion, suicide, sexuality, rape, 9/11 and throwing battery acid at politicians. It doesn’t matter if you find these things hugely offensive or fucking hilarious, when they’re held up as examples of what’s funny, it’s hardly surprising that their tone and sentiment is echoed on the streets. But it’s their job to say controversial things; it’s our job to recognise that we shouldn’t repeat them in public. We need to learn to distinguish between our private and public lives, and recognise what’s acceptable and where.

And that’s exactly why I’ve found writing a book on fucking good manners a most troublesome task. There’s simply no way of writing a whole book about how people should behave that will have readers across the world nodding their heads in agreement. For one, because in Bulgaria and other Baltic states people quite often shake their head from side to side to show agreement. Excessive eye contact is regarded as aggressive in Japan, but courteous in the US; crossing your fingers in Vietnam is a symbol for a vagina; a harmless thumbs up translates as ‘fuck you’ in parts of Greece and Iran. There is no global code of conduct, and even if you take away these perceived cultural quirks, a lot still depends on individual circumstances and opinion.

So what are we left with? Well, some of it’s manners, some etiquette, some courtesy and general politeness, some anti-social behaviour, some laws of the land, some common-fucking-sense, and probably some plain old boring #firstworldproblems. But it’s not meant to be a checklist of how everyone should behave on a daily basis. I’m not judging anyone who does any of these things – except, perhaps one or two of the celebrities mentioned for their diva behaviour. We’ve all been guilty of some fairly knobbish behaviour at some point in life, and let the crazy little voices inside our heads justify our reasons for doing so. This book is simply an attempt to highlight a few of these errors, and perhaps help us all look out for each other from time to time. With some potty words thrown in for dramatic effect. As Emily Post – the godmother of modern etiquette – said: ‘Manners are a sensitive awareness of the feelings of others. If you have that awareness, you have good manners, no matter what fork you use.’2

A HISTORY OF MANNERS

‘Consideration for others is the basis of a good life, a good society.’

CONFUCIUS

We might take for granted that much of what’s perceived as acceptable behaviour in modern society is common-bloody-sense, but that hasn’t always been the case. Just as manners change from one culture to another, so they have evolved over time as we attempt to become more and more civilised. Once upon a time it wasn’t particularly frowned upon to be seen urinating in the dining room (master of the house only, not the servants), or eating with your hands, or using the skull of your enemy as a ceremonial drinking vessel. But some of us have moved on since then.

Perhaps the best place to start is around 1500 BC when a chap called Moses walked down a mountain with a few rules carved into stone. Ten, to be precise. Among some of the more fundamental ideas such as No Stealing, No Murdering and No Adultery, we got a decent schooling on lying, coveting and honouring. A Good Book also reminds us all to ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself.’

The Romans were keen to adopt a more civilised society and it was their Empire that introduced us to the early concept of the metrosexual, with baths, nasal trimming and toothbrushes demonstrating a consideration towards others. Sadly they were yet to invent toothpaste, so had to make do with a delicious mixture of crushed bones and horse urine, for long-lasting, pissy-fresh breath.

Horses also play an important role in the next big step, but not until the Middle Ages when the concept of chivalry became a bit of a thing. The word derives from the French chevalier, meaning horseman. These brave and noble knights in shining armour were famed for their heroic quests and ability to save princesses from people with dubious moral standards. On top of that it appears they were also more in touch with their emotions, and knew how to charm the ladies. A Code of Chivalry was created, the contents of which vary depending on who you’re reading, but roughly speaking it gives a big thumbs up to respecting others, being brave, generous, loyal and honest, and not tethering your horse in a disabled bay.

Around a similar time a gentleman called Daniel of Beccles was creating what many consider to be the first modern book on manners: Urbanus Magnus, or The Book of the Civilised Man. It’s a 3,000-line poem in Latin that covers three main themes: social hierarchy, self-control and sexual morality, dispensing such invaluable pointers as: ‘do not attack your enemy while he is squatting to defecate’, ‘do not openly evacuate your nostril by twisting your fingers’ and, if visiting a sex worker: ‘empty your testicles quickly and depart quickly.’3

The 16th century saw a flurry of notable works from various parts of Europe, perhaps due to the increased thuggery on display across the continent. Erasmus of Rotterdam became the first person to lose his shit in public about kids of today not respecting their elders in De Civilitate Morum Puerilium (1530) (aka A Handbook on Good Manners for Children). And then Giovanni Della Casa penned Galateo: The Rules of Polite Behaviour in 1558 which gave some helpful advice on not bragging about your children, checking your mail in front of other people, or joking about disabilities, as well as further consideration on nasal etiquette: ‘You do not want, when you blow your nose, to then open the hanky and gaze at your snot as if pearls or rubies might have descended from your brains.’4

In 1533 another Italian, Catherine de Medici, made a significant contribution to the mannersphere when she married Henry II of France. Along with the many other culinary delights she brought with her from Italy, she also packed a weird stick with prongs on it. This was a fork, and it soon caught on across the courts of France and the rest of Europe as a sign of refinement and sophistication. But it wasn’t for another few hundred years that we’d start arguing over which one was for the fish, and which one was for the salad.

Around the middle of the 18th century, the 4th Earl of Chesterfield, Philip Stanhope (Phil to his mates), laid down some ground rules for his son on becoming a nice guy, including such life-affirming, timeless classics as ‘Whatever’s worth doing at all, is worth doing well’, ‘Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today’ and ‘Do as you would be done by, is the surest method of pleasing’.5 Stanhope’s words were never meant to be published, but Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1746–47) became an influential bestseller. It’s also one of the first examples of the word etiquette being used in the modern English language, derived from the French étiquette, meaning label or small sign.

So the story goes, Louis XIV of France started to get a bit pissed off with the rowdy behaviour at his summer parties trashing his garden. As a result he created a collection of signs to advise guests on appropriate behaviour – Please keep off the grass, No pissing in the fountain, No football shirts or trainers. That sort of stuff. Hence the word étiquette became synonymous with good manners.

Moving into the early 20th century and further unrest across Europe meant we needed another proverbial kick up the backside, which came from the sharp boot of Emily Post with Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics, and at Home (1922). Post covers a lot of the traditional values: ‘Elbows are never put on the table while one is eating’, ‘A lady never asks a gentleman to dance, or to go to supper with her’ and ‘To do exactly as your neighbours do is the only sensible rule’.6 Which is fine, so long as you’ve never lived next to Fred and Rose West. She also, perhaps inadvertently, gave advice that many modern men – from Sir Ian Botham to Anthony Weiner – should take notice of:

‘A gentleman does not boast about his junk.’

In 1936 Dale Carnegie released his bestseller How To Win Friends And Influence People, which could easily be seen as a book on courtesy, if only with a bit more of an agenda attached to it. The word courtesy derives from the French word courtoisie or ‘of the court’. Back in the Middle Ages nobles had to work out a plan to get in the king’s good books if they wanted to run his land. Steven Pinker in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature writes:

‘The nobles had to change their marketing. They had to cultivate their manners, so as not to offend the king’s minions … The manners appropriate for the court came to be called “courtly” manners or “courtesy”. The etiquette guides, with their advice on where to place one’s nasal mucus, originated as manuals for how to behave in the king’s court.’7

Substitute the word ‘king’ for ‘managing director’ or ‘chairman’ and you can see how Carnegie’s tome is as much about manners as it is about running a successful business. Whether you agree with the scruples behind his thinking is a different matter. We all have agendas in life, whether they’re hidden or not, but expecting something in return for our manners is a dangerous line to take.

In 2014 China introduced a ‘Social Credit Rating’ across parts of the country where citizens are rated on their conduct and behaviour. Being good gives you privileges such as access to the best schools, discounts on energy bills and even boosted ratings on dating websites. Conversely, stepping out of line can result in a travel ban, restrictions on jobs and having your dog taken away. The programme is set for full roll-out across the country by 2020, under the catchy/creepy banner of ‘keeping trust is glorious and breaking trust is disgraceful’.8 It sounds like the kind of dystopian vision of the future dreamt up in the mind of George Orwell or Charlie Brooker, and in fact the latter’s Black Mirror episode ‘Nosedive’ (2016) is pretty much a carbon copy of this Big Brother state.

Showing kindness and consideration towards others should only be done because it’s a fucking kind and considerate thing to do. If something other than a warm glow of satisfaction comes out of it, then consider it an added bonus. As Giovanni Della Casa said back in 1558:

‘Our manners are attractive when we regard others’ pleasure and not our own delight.’

1. BASIC MANNERS

‘Telling a lie is called wrong. Telling the truth is called right. Except when telling the truth is called bad manners and telling a lie is called polite.’

JUDITH VIORST, ‘MANNERS’

BASIC MANNERS

The basics of manners should be – I hope – fairly fucking basic to get to grips with. Over the years we should have all picked up a reasonable sense of right and wrong from our family, friends and teachers, plus a few pointers from daytime television shows of a dubious moral nature. Whether we choose to put these principles into action on a regular basis is a little less fucking clear-cut.

Once we step outside our front door to go about our daily chores, we need to be aware that we’re entering a shared space that’s for all of us to use. Every day we encounter thousands of people, whether we’re sat on the bus, in the office, or waiting in a queue for an X-Factor