Have some ye trad early Jan grouchies!
***
I put it to you, my dearios, that if you are contacting a scholar about your postdoc work within their field, it might be rather a good idea to take a look at some of their copious scholarship in the area of your topic. This would save you from annoying them with a postdoc project proposal based on outworn ( Read more... )

I'm not talking about actual table manners here, but about that subtextual claim I was referencing yesterday that proper civilised eating takes place with all the household (except for the servants?) round the table, and engaging in suitable conversation - presumably the mess rules apply of no politics, religion, or sex, talk. Possibly with grace ( Read more... )

Dept of, If Raised By Wolves Would Have Better Manners. O Peter Bradshaw. The gaggle of small(ish) boys infesting the Tube I was on today had better manners:
I nabbed my favourite aisle seat. The screening was overcrowded, and Ms Lipman had to sit on a stair. Halfway through the film, I dashed out to take what seemed to be an emergency call from my ( Read more... )

Dept of, if these people had been raised by wolves their manners would be a whole lot better: or, I think there is a whole point there about fearfully poor ton that John Naughton, in his usual rush to go WOEZ WOEZ SOSHUL NETWORKZ B EVUL, just goes sailing right on by:
Nick Bilton, a NYT columnist, recounts a recent dinner party that he hosted, in ( Read more... )

It's a long time since anyone actually said to me explicitly 'But surely a grown woman should have the poise to be able to deal with unwelcome attentions' in a discussion about sexual harassment, and in that case it was a bloke of at least a generation senior to myself, at a time when the issue was just beginning to be articulated.

Which I somehow ( Read more... )

That this problem seems to be more one for Miss Manners than Pamela Stephenson Connolly.

Not to mention that leaving detectable signs of what he's been up to is, possibly, just a leetle insanitary?

Could he not acquire his own laptop without their intervention? Should he not have done so?

I really do not think this is about the right of the older ( Read more... )

O Hugh Muir, bless:
[L]egality isn't everything. We could hack each other off in all sorts of ways without breaking the law; but that's no way to live.

And is that not what civility is all about?

And on civility and public goods, I will admit that I am ambivalent about Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell's surrealist book art, now on exhibition. I ( Read more... )

England is not a country riven by antisocial behaviour, says Young Foundation, but posh does not always mean polite.
Rude Britannia is a myth - we are among the world's most polite people.
Manners matters, says a report on civility. And the good news is that we are nicer than we thought.

And on those crassly rude posh types, herewith some evidence ( Read more... )

Several times over the past few weeks, people have greeted me with

'You're looking well!'*

and I am essentially WTF about this.

What is the meaning of this? Is the implication that I looked utterly terrible last time they saw me? Or is it one of those phrases that means something else entirely?

I don't think I'd go around saying this to people, ( Read more... )

This is in context of one of my colleagues having had something rather devastating happen.*

While one wants to express sympathy, I'm always a bit dubious about asking questions. Partly because they just may not want to talk about it, and partly because people tend to be asking the same questions over and over again and this gets tedious very ( Read more... )