“Nobody uses cutlery while resting their elbows on the table either. They just rest there when not using it.”
Yes, they do. My DD has to be constantly corrected over this, she sort of slumps and uses her knife and fork really awkwardly.
I think we can see from many of the responses on this thread that a lot of people are happy to have no table manners (presumably they are the ones the OP keeps running across) as they seem to be telling us they are a making a stand against discrimination and fighting the class war. Well done, them. They should really have t-shirts made, though, in that case, because when those of us with table manners encounter them, we just think they don’t know how to eat in public.
I think in general people have become less considerate of other people. When I was growing up, we were taught constantly to make sure our conduct didn’t impinge on others - we learned to sit quietly in boring situations, to keep our voices down in public and to avoid eating smelly food in enclosed spaces, like a train carriage. This took a lot of parental effort - my mother was constantly engaging with us on long train journeys, for example, playing word games or looking out of the window with us and talking about what we could see, looking at comics or magazines with us, drawing etc to keep us quietly occupied. These days, lots of children aren’t taught in this way because it’s tiring and many of us would rather look at our phones whilst our kids are tootling about on their iPads, but there are also parents who think this crushes their little darling’s natural exuberance so they are happy for their child to piss everyone else off because they are ‘expressing themselves’. Add this to the growing culture of ‘I’ll do whatever I fucking want, when I want to’ and it’s no surprise that eating out, going to the theatre/cinema and generally being in public is so unpleasant.