The Giant Value Seal Mural on Bartlett Street

Source: Uploaded by user via Charles on Pinterest

Go Ahead: Use Your iPhone at the Table

I haven't been writing a lot about etiquette in recent years, but I'm still occasionally asked to talk about manners matters of the day -- journalists working on etiquette-related articles find me online and ask for a few quotes.

It happened today: A journalist wanted to ask me about the use of mobile devices in restaurants (a common topic) -- and as is frequently the case, she expected me to deplore their use. She had pre-cast me as a prim manners maven with sensibilities firmly rooted in a pre-smartphone era: She wanted some quotes along these lines: "No phones at the table! Smartphones at the table are making us ruder and ruining civilization!"

The problem is, I just don't think that's true.

Disagreeing with Myself
I flipped back through my book to see what I'd had to say -- way back in the early 2000s -- about cell-phone use, and I found some quotes that would've have pleased this reporter. For instance:

"People who use their cell phones to carry on chitchatty conversations when dining look, to those around them, not only rude but also silly...."

Yes, I still agree with that one. Then there's:

"Keep cell phones ... off of the table during a meal."  

On this point, my attitude has evolved.

Here's the thing: Smartphones aren't, in and of themselves, rude. People behave rudely; machines are just tools. You can be just as rude at the dinner table with a facial expression or a gesture as you can with a mobile device.

I think it's naive to say that this or that new technology is "ruining civilization" -- keep in mind, people have been saying this with every new technology that's come along since the printing press. The tone of the absolutist anti-smartphone crowd sounds very similar to the tone of, say, the absolutist "anti-unescorted-ladies-in-saloons" crowd and the "anti-teaching-poor-people-to-read" crowd. Their cry is "It just isn't done!"

As someone interested in etiquette, I always ask, "Why isn't it done?" There's always manners friction at times of great change -- when old assumptions about the way things ought to be done bump into new technologies or social mores.

New technologies don't make us ruder. New technologies make us different 

What's So Rude About Texting, Anyway?
We understand that obtrusive noise is rude -- this includes loud cell-phone conversations in otherwise subdued environments, such as restaurants. I wrote my book way back when using a portable phone was likely to mean talking into it -- how quaint, right? But now we're using our smartphones primarily for silent activities -- so what's the problem?

Well, the other reason that using your smartphone at the table is rude is this: It's disrespectful of the people you're dining with -- it takes your attention away from your shared meal, and shared meals are highly symbolic (being that they are the very basis of human civilization).

So it's this display of disrespect that's the problem, not the device (you could be just as disrespectful by turning your chair a bit to one side).

But not everyone feels disrespected by others' using mobile devices -- and this group is growing. For instance, I frequently dine with a set of friends whom I also interact with on various social platforms, and with whom I share a large interconnected group of friends. With these friends, using my iPhone to quickly tweet my location isn't disrespectful -- because we're all familiar with the activity. At a business lunch, it's now quite normal for a group of acquainted colleagues to pause and check in with their BlackBerries. These things are happening; it's time to remove the absolutist ban.

When in doubt about the attitudes of your companions, it's always better to err on the side of caution -- but the complexity of the real world means that "Never do this" rules don't make sense. You have to pay attention to context. As is often the case with questions of proper behavior, the answer to "Is it rude to use your smartphone at the table?" has to be "It depends, dear. Use your common sense, and employ moderation."

Looking to the Future
Recently, a Los Angeles Times story discussed how restaurants are resisting, or adapting to, this change in the way we behave. It struck me that the restauranteurs who wanted to ban smart devices from their dining rooms were objecting primarily to the aesthetics of them -- their basic argument is that the people using them looked tacky. Fair enough. But "tacky" is subjective -- and yesterday's tacky (men without ties and jackets in nice restaurants) is tomorrow's normal. I was much more interested in reading how restaurants are adapting to the new normal.

In some ways, I am old-fashioned. I don't think a phone should be set down on the table, usually -- but there have to be exceptions. When I dine alone (as I often do when I'm traveling), I prop my iPad on the table to read -- call it tacky if you must.

Many More Bar Jokes Involving Grammar and Punctuation

McSweeney's recently published "Seven Bar Jokes Involving Grammar and Punctuation"—and those jokes launched a joke exchange (on Facebook) between me and my brilliant sister Sarah. We came up with more grammar- and punctuation-related (and usage-related) jokes. I think ours are far better than McSweeney's, but you be the judge:

Sarah: An ellipsis walks into a bar ...

Sarah: The past perfect had walked into a bar.

Sarah: A priest, a rabbi, and a serial comma walked into a bar.

Charles: This guy who had a relative clause walked into a bar.

Sarah: A mysterious woman—overly fond of em dashes—walked into a bar.

Charles: A copy editor walked into a bar and sat down next to a preposition he wanted to end a sentence with.

Sarah: A bleary-eyed copy editor walked into a bar and refused to leave until properly hyphenated.

Charles: A subject walked into a bar and demanded a compound predicate!

Charles: How many writers does it take to stet a light bulb that has been changed?

Charles: A simile walked into a bar like a salmon swimming upstream to spawn.

Sarah: Into a bar walked one line of blank verse.

Sarah: A parallel construction walked into a bar, sat on a stool, and spat at a stranger.

Charles: A superfluous comma walked, into a bar.

Sarah: An unnecessarily capitalized Man walked into a bar.

Sarah: Now that's just pathetic; a semicolon walking into a bar as though he were a full-fledged colon.

Charles: Apostrophes are not welcome in the bar's around here.

Sarah: Your not kidding about that.

Now add your jokes in the Comments section!

On Emoticons

I resisted emoticons for years—all those cute little smiley graphics and punctuation-mark approximations seemed sort of ... immature. But the older I get, the less "maturity" seems to matter. And in recent years, emoticons have made their way into frequent rotation in my social correspondence. At work, I use them less often, but I expect they will continue to make inroads there, in time.

So I read with interest this story in The New York Times: "If You're Happy and You Know It, Must I Know Too?"

It's one of those "end of human intelligence" stories in which experts bemoan the fact that a new technology will spell doom for literacy (if not civilization itself). As Bill Lancaster, a lecturer in communications at Northeastern University in Boston, puts it in the story, "[Emoticons are] part of the degradation of writing skills—grammar, syntax, sentence structure, even penmanship—that come with digital technology."

I disagree with Lancaster on this point. Technology is changing language, yes. But language is always changing. It's supposed to. I imagine 15th-century Lancaster types bemoaning the fact that Gutenberg's newfangled printing press would spell the end of our ability to remember and recount long stories (and perhaps it did, but I think we're better off for the bargain).

Sure, emoticons can be a crutch. But as a shorthand, they're effective and suited to the medium of texting and email. Elsewhere in the Times story, emoticons are called "lazy," and we're invited to imagine The Great Gatsby's final sentence followed by a frowny face: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past :-("

That's funny, but I don't think it's fair. Fitzgerald had access to illustrations but didn't use them—and isn't that what emoticons are? Just because a writer uses emoticons in his emails doesn't mean he's going to use them in everything he writes. I think most of us know the difference between a tiny picture of a cartoon tomato and the word tomato.

Looking at work emails that I've used smileys in, I feel that they've returned a dimension to interpersonal communication that we took for granted at the height of the telephone era: the helpful clues offered by facial expression and tone of voice. (The anti-emoticon language purists surely wouldn't insist that I speak in a monotone and avoid facial expressions when I'm communicating face to face.) A smile can buffer a request, soften a criticism, or indicate irony, whether it's personal or digital. Emoticons are rudimentary, sure, and many of us are still figuring out how frequently to use them—but I can look at them as a step forward for clarity in communication, not a step back.