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DEAR MISS MANNERS: When I was growing up, my mother was adamant that I learn proper manners, especially at the dinner table. Bad table manners were my mother's pet peeve, and they became mine, as well.

I have a hard time understanding why other people were not taught this growing up. Am I just old-school, and manners are outdated now? Even basic things have gone to the wayside, like: no electronics at the table; wait till everyone is seated before starting to eat; don't use your fingers; ask to be excused before leaving the table; and so on.

Where have all the manners gone?

GENTLE READER: And you haven't even mentioned the greatest loss of what used to be learned at the family dinner table: conversation.

Being taught society's standard eating rituals, so as not to disgust others by violating them, was certainly a useful part of ordinary child-rearing. Yet many now think of it as a wasteful ritual requiring compliance to petty rules.

In reality, instruction in table manners was incidental to the main lesson, which was how to exchange ideas, frame a polite argument and, if necessary, pretend to be interested in what others had done that day. In other words, to learn to socialize.

But Miss Manners supposes that you must know what has happened: the loss of nightly family dinner. That was where all this was taught, in a more or less pleasant atmosphere.

With all due sympathy for the difficulties of scheduling a communal meal among competing activities -- not to mention cooking (or procuring) the food and luring people away from their electronics -- it is well worth the trouble. Surely, at this time, we can all recognize that civilized sociability is not our natural state, and that it takes instruction to maintain it.

DEAR MISS MANNERS: What is the proper greeting when being introduced to someone? It used to be "How do you do," but is that outdated now?

GENTLE READER: Apparently it is, because Miss Manners notices how startled people are when she says it.

They seem to wonder: Why is she probing to know the welfare of those she is meeting for the first time? Should they, or need they, tell her about the state of their health? Or did she mean "what," not "how," and wants to know about their jobs?

That it is merely a conventional statement, not a question, is puzzling to those who take all speech literally. But there has not been an adequate substitute found.

"Pleased to meet you" is ridiculed as recklessly endorsing a stranger, while any remark approaching "What do you do?" has the opposite problem of seeming to weigh whether the stranger is worth one's acquaintance.

For those for whom "How do you do" is too formal, or too confusing, a simple "Hello" will have to do until someone comes up with something better.

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(Please send your questions to Miss Manners at her website, www.missmanners.com; to her email, gentlereader@missmanners.com; or through postal mail to Miss Manners, Andrews McMeel Syndication, 1130 Walnut St., Kansas City, MO 64106.)

Copyright 2026 Judith Martin

COPYRIGHT 2026 JUDITH MARTIN